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FIVE STAGES. OF. 
GREEK RELIGION 


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A 
GILBERT MURRAY 


Regius Professor of Greek 
in the University of Oxford 





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PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION 


In revising the Four Stages of Greek Religion I have 
found myself obliged to change its name. I felt there 
was a gap inthe story. The high-water mark of Greek 
religious thought seems to me to have come just be- 
tween the Olympian Religion and the Failure of Nerve ; 
and the decline—if that is the right word—which 1s 
observable in the later ages of antiquity is a decline not 
from Olympianism but from the great spiritual and 
intellectual effort of the fourth century B.c., which 
culminated in the Metaphysics and the De Anima and 
the foundation of the Stoa and the Garden. Conse- 
quently I have added a new chapter at this point and 
raised the number of Stages to five. 

My friend Mr. E. E. Genner has kindly arabia me 
to correct two or three errors in the first edition, and 
I owe special thanks to my old pupil, Professor E. R. 
Dodds, for several interesting observations and criti- 
cisms on points connected with Plotinus and Sallustius. 
Otherwise I have altered little. I am only sorry to 
have left the book so long out of print. 


G. M. 


PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION 


Tuts small book has taken a long time in growing. 
Though the first two essays were only put in writing 
this year for a course of lectures which I had the 
honour of delivering at Columbia University, the 
third, which was also used at Columbia, had in its 
main features appeared in the Hibbert ‘fournal in 1910, 
the fourth in part in the English Review in 1908; the 
translation of Sallustius was made in 1907 for use with 
a small class at Oxford. Much of the material is much 
older in conception, and all has been reconsidered. 
I must thank the editors of both the above-named 
periodicals for their kind permission to reprint. 

I think it was the writings of my friend Mr. Andrew 
Lang that first awoke me, in my undergraduate days, 
to the importance of anthropology and primitive 
religion to a Greek scholar. Certainly I began then 
to feel that the great works of the ancient Greek 
imagination are penetrated habitually by religious 
conceptions and postulates which literary scholars like 
myself had not observed or understood. In the 
meantime the situation has changed. Greek religion 
is being studied right and left, and has revealed itself 


PREFACE - 


as a surprisingly rich and attractive, though somewhat 
controversial, subject. It used to be a deserted 
territory ; now it is at least a battle-ground. If ever 
the present differences resolved themselves into a simple 
fight with shillelaghs between the scholars and the 
anthropologists, | should without doubt wield my 
reluctant weapon on the side of the scholars. Scholar- 
ship is the rarer, harder, less popular and perhaps the 
more permanently valuable work, and it certainly 
stands more in need of defence at the moment. But 
in the meantime I can hardly understand how the 
purest of ‘ pure scholars’ can fail to feel his knowledge 
enriched by the savants who have compelled us to 
dig below the surface of our classical tradition and to 
realize the imaginative and historical problems which 
so often lie concealed beneath the smooth security of 
a verbal ‘construe’, My own essays do not for a 
moment claim to speak with authority on a subject 
which is still changing and showing new facets year 
by year. They only claim to represent the way of 
regarding certain large issues of Greek Religion which 
has gradually taken shape, and has proved practically 
helpful and consistent with facts, in the mind of a very 
constant, though unsystematic, reader of many various 
periods of Greek literature. 

In the first essay my debt to Miss Harrison is great 
and obvious. My statement of one or two points 1s 


8 PREFACE 


probably different from hers, but in the main I follow 
her lead. And in either case I cannot adequately 
describe the advantage I have derived from many years 
of frequent discussion and comparison of results with 
a Hellenist whose learning and originality of mind are 
only equalled by her vivid generosity towards her 
fellow-workers. 

The second may also be said to have grown out of 
Miss Harrison’s writings. She has by now made the 
title of ‘Olympian’ almost a term of reproach, and 
thrown down so many a scornful challenge to the 
canonical gods of Greece, that I have ventured on 
this attempt to explain their historical origin and plead 
for their religious value. When the essay was already 
written I read Mr. Chadwick’s impressive book on 
The Heroic Age (Cambridge, 1912), and was delighted 
to find in an author whose standpoint and equipment 
are so different from mine so much that confirmed or 
clarified my own view. 

The title of the third essay I owe to a conversation 
with Professor J. B. Bury. We were discussing the 
change that took place in Greek thought between, 
say, Plato and the Neo-Platonists, or even between 
Aristotle and Posidonius, and which is seen at its 
highest power in the Gnostics. I had been calling it 
a rise of asceticism, or mysticism, or religious passion, 
or the like, when my friend corrected me. ‘ It is not 





PREFACE 9 


a rise; it is a fall or failure of something, a sort of 
failure of nerve.—We are treading here upon some- 
what firmer ground than in the first two essays. ‘The 
field for mere conjecture is less: we are supported 
more continuously by explicit documents. Yet the 
subject is a very difficult one owing to the scattered 
and chaotic nature of the sources, and even where 
we get away from fragments and reconstructions and 
reach definite treatises with or without authors’ names, 
I cannot pretend to feel anything like the same clearness 
about the true meaning of a passage in Philo or the 
Corpus Hermeticum that one normally feels in a writer 
of the classical period. Consequently in this essay 
I think I have hugged my modern authorities rather 
close, and seldom expressed an opinion for which I[ 
could not find some fairly authoritative backing, my 
debt being particularly great to Reitzenstein, Bousset, 
and the brilliant Hellentstisch-rémische Kultur of 
P. Wendland. I must also thank my old pupil, 
Mr. Edwyn Bevan, who was kind enough to read 
this book in proof, for some valuable criticisms. 
The subject is one of such extraordinary interest that 
I offer no apology for calling further attention to it. 
A word or two about the last brief revival of the 
ancient religion under ‘ Julian the Apostate’ forms 
the natural close to this series of studies. But here our 
material, both historical and literary, is so abundant 
2960 B 


10 PREFACE 


that I have followed a different method. After a short 
historical introduction I have translated in full a very 
curious and little-known ancient text, which may be 
said to constitute something like an authoritative 
Pagan creed. Some readers may regret that I do not 
give the Greek as well as the English. I am reluctant, 
however, to publish a text which I have not examined 
in the MSS., and I feel also that, while an edition of 
Sallustius is rather urgently needed, it ought to be an 
edition with a full commentary. 

I was first led to these studies by the wish to fill up 
certain puzzling blanks of ignorance in my own mind, 
and doubtless the little book bears marks of this origin. 
It aims largely at the filling of interstices. It avoids 
the great illuminated places, and gives its mind to the 
stretches of intervening twilight. It deals little with 
the harvest of flowers or fruit, but watches the incon- 
spicuous seasons when the soil is beginning to stir, the 


seeds are falling or ripening. 


G. M. 





CONTENTS 


I. Sarurnta Recna 

Il. THe Otympian CongQuest 
Til. Tue Great Scuoots 
IV. Tue Farture or Nerve. 


V. Tue Last Protest 


APPENDIX: ‘TRANSLATION OF THE TREATISE OF. 


SALLUSTIUS, wept @eav kai Kéopov 


INDEX 


PAGE 
15 
57 

103 
153 


209 


239 


269 





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I 
SATURNIA REGNA 


Many persons who are quite prepared to admit the 
importance to the world of Greek poetry, Greek art, 
and Greek philosophy, may still feel it rather a paradox 
to be told that Greek religion specially repays our study 
at the present day. Greek religion, associated with 
a romantic, trivial, and not very edifying mythology, 
has generally seemed one of the weakest spots in the 
armour of those giants of the old world. Yet I will 
venture to make for Greek religion almost as great 
a claim as for the thought and the literature, not only 
because the whole mass of it is shot through by those 
strange lights of feeling and imagination, and the 
details of it constantly wrought into beauty by that 
Instinctive sense of artistic form, which we specially 
associate with Classical Greece, but also for two. 
definite historical reasons. In the first place, the 
student of that dark and fascinating department of 
the human mind which we may call Religious Origins, 
will find in Greece an extraordinary mass of material 
belonging to a very early date. For detail and variety 
the primitive Greek evidence has no equal. And, | 
secondly, in this department as in others, ancient 
Greece has the triumphant if tragic distinction of 
beginning at the very bottom and struggling, however 
precariously, to the very summits. ‘There is hardly 


16 SATURNIA REGNA I 


any horror of primitive superstition of which we cannot 
find somge distant traces in our Greek record. There 
is hardly any height of spiritual thought attained in the 
world that has not its archetype or its echo in the 
stretch of Greek literature that lies between Thales and 
Plotinus, embracing much of the ‘ Wisdom-Teachers ’” 
and of St. Paul. 

The«progress“of “Greek religion falls rebar into 

threesstages, all of them historically important. First 
/ there is the primitive Luéthe1a or Age of Ignorance, 
before Zeus came to trouble men’s minds, a stage to 
which our anthropologists and explorers have found 
parallels in every part of the world. Dr. Preuss applies 
to it the charming word ‘ Urdummheit ’, or ‘ Primal 
Stupidity’. In some ways characteristically Greek, 
in others it is so typical of similar stages of thought 
elsewhere that one is tempted to regard it as the 
normal beginning of all religion, or almost as the 
normal raw material out of which religion is made. 
There is certainly some repulsiveness, but I confess 
that to me there is also an element of fascination in 
the study of these ‘ Beastly Devices of the Heathen ’, 
at any rate as they appear in early Greece, where each 
single * beastly device ’ as it passes is somehow touched 
with beauty and transformed by some spirit of upward 
striving. 

Secondly there is the Olympian or classical stage, 
a stage in which, for good or ill, blunderingly or 
successfully, this primitive vagueness was reduced to a 
kind of order. ‘T’his is the stage of the great Olym- 
pian gods, who dominated art and poetry, ruled the 





I SATURNIA REGNA 17 


imagination of Rome, and extended a kind of romantic 
dominion even over the Middle Ages. It is the stage 
that we learn, or mis-learn, from the statues and the 
handbooks of mythology. Critics have said that this 
Olympian stage has value only as art and not as 
religion. That is just one of the points into which 
we shall inquire. 

Thirdly, there is the Hellenistic period, reaching 
roughly from Plato to St. Paul and the earlier Gnostics. 
The first edition of this book treated the whole period 
as one, but I have now divided it by writing a new 
chapter on the Movements of the Fourth Century s. c., 
and making that my third stage. This was the time 
when the Greek mind, still in its full creative vigour, 
made its first response to the twofold failure of the 
world in which it had put its faith, the open. bank- 
ruptcy.ofthe Olympian religion and the collapse of the 
city-state. Both had failed, and each tried vainly to 
supply the place of the other. Greece responded by 
the creation of two great permanent types of philo- 
sophy which have influenced human ethics ever since, 
the Cynic and Stoic schools on the one hand, and the 
Epicurean on the other. These schools belong properly, 
I think, to the history of religion. ‘The successors 
of Aristotle produced rather a school of progressive 
science, those of Plato a school of refined scepticism. 
The religious side of Plato’s thought was not revealed 
in its full power till the time of Plotinus in the third 
century a. D.; that of Aristotle, one might say without 
undue paradox, not till its exposition by Aquinas in 
the thirteenth. 

2960 Cc 











18 SATURNIA REGNA I 


The old Third Stage, therefore, becomes now a 
Fourth, comprising the later and more popular move- 
ments of the Hellenistic Age, a period based on the 
consciousness of manifold failure, and consequently 
touched both with morbidity and with that spiritual 
exaltation which is so often the companion of morbid- 
ity. It not only had behind it the failure of the 
Olympian theology and of the free city-state, now 
crushed by semi-barbarous military monarchies; it 
lived through the gradual realization of two other 
failures—the failure of human government, even when 
backed by the power of Rome or the wealth of Egypt, 
to achieve a good life for man; and lastly the failure 
of the great propaganda of Hellenism, in which the 
long-drawn effort of Greece to educate a corrupt and 
barbaric world seemed only to lead to the corruption 
or barbarization of the very ideals which it sought to 
spread. This sense of failure, this progressive loss of 
hope in the world, in sober calculation, and in organized 
human effort, threw the later Greek back upon his own 
soul, upon the pursuit of personal holiness, upon 
emotions, mysteries and revelations, upon the com- 
parative neglect of this transitory and imperfect world 
for the sake of some dream-world far off, which shall 
subsist without sin or corruption, the same yesterday, 
to-day, and for ever. These four are the really signifi- 
cant and formative periods of Greek religious thought ; 
but we may well cast our eyes also on a fifth stage, not 
historically influential perhaps, but at least romantic 
and interesting and worthy of considerable respect, 
when the old religion in the time of Julian roused itself 


I SATURNIA REGNA 19 


for a last spiritual protest against the all-conquering 
‘atheism’ of the Christians. I omit Plotinus, as in 
earlier chapters | have omitted Plato and Aristotle, and 
for the same reason. Asarule in the writings of Julian’s 
circle and still more in the remains of popular belief, 
the tendencies of our fourth stage are accentuated by 
an increased demand for definite dogma and a still 
deeper consciousness of worldly defeat. 


I shall not start with any definition of religion. 
Religion, like poetry and most other living things, 
cannot be defined. But one may perhaps give some 
description of it, or at least some characteristic marks. 
In the first place, religion essentially deals with the 
uncharted region of human experience. A large part 
of human life has been thoroughly surveyed and 
explored ; we understand the causes at work; and we 
are not bewildered by the problems. ‘That is the 
domain of positive knowledge. But all round us on 
every side there is an uncharted region, just fragments 
of the fringe of it explored, and those imperfectly ; 
it is with this that religion deals. And secondly we 
may note that religion deals with its own province not 
tentatively, by the normal methods of patient intellec- 
tual research, but directly, and by methods of emotion 
or sub-conscious apprehension. Agriculture, for in- 
stance, used to be entirely a question of religion ; now 
it is almost entirely a question of science. In antiquity, 
if a field was barren, the owner of it would probably 
assume that the barrenness was due to ‘ pollution ’, or 
offence somewhere. He would run through all his own 


20 SATURNIA REGNA I 


possible offences, or at any rate those of his neighbours 
and ancestors, and when he eventually decided the 
cause of the trouble, the steps that he would take would 
all be of a kind calculated not to affect the chemical 
constitution of the soil, but to satisfy his own emotions 
of guilt and terror, or the imaginary emotions of the 
imaginary being he had offended. A modern man in 
the same predicament would probably not think of 
religion at all, at any rate in the earlier stages; he 
would say it was a case for deeper ploughing or for basic 
slag. Later on, if disaster followed disaster till he began 
to feel himself a marked man, even the average modern 
would, I think, begin instinctively to reflect upon his 
sins. A third characteristic flows from the first. The 
uncharted region surrounds us on every side and is 
apparently infinite; consequently, when once the 
things of the uncharted region are admitted as factors 
in our ordinary conduct of life they are apt to be 
infinite factors, overruling and swamping all others. 
The thing that religion forbids is a thing never to be 
done; not all the inducements that this life can offer 
weigh at allin the balance. Indeed there is no balance. 
The man who makes terms with his conscience is 
essentially non-religious ; the religious man knows that 
it will profit him nothing if he gain all this finite world 
and lose his stake in the infinite and eternal.} 


1 Professor Emile Durkheim in his famous analysis of the religious 
emotions argues that when a man feels the belief and the command 
as something coming from without, superior, authoritative, of infinite 
import, it is because religion is the work of the tribe and, as such, 
superior to the individual. The voice of God is the imagined voice of 


I SATURNIA REGNA 21 


Am I going to draw no distinction then between | 
religion and mere superstition? Notat present. Later 
on we may perhaps see some way to it. Superstition is 
the name given to a low or bad form of religion, to the 
kind of religion we disapprove. ‘The line of division, 
if we made one, would be only an arbitrary bar thrust 
across a highly complex and continuous process. 

Does this amount to an implication that all the 
religions that have existed in the world are false? Not: 
so. It is obvious indeed that most, if analysed into 
intellectual beliefs, are false; and I suppose that 


the whole tribe, heard or imagined by him who is going to break its 
laws. I have some difficulty about the psychology implied in this 
doctrine: surely the apparent externality of the religious command 
seems to belong to a fairly common type of experience, in which the 
personality is divided, so that first one part of it and then another 
emerges into consciousness, If you forget an engagement, sometimes 
your peace is disturbed for quite a long time by a vague external 
annoyance or condemnation, which at last grows to be a distinct 
judgement—‘ Heavens! I ought to be at the Committee on So-and- 
so.’ But apart from this criticism, there is obviously much historical 
truth in Professor Durkheim’s theory, and it is not so different as 
it seems at first sight from the ordinary beliefs of religions men. The 
tribe to primitive man is not a mere group of human beings. It is his 
whole world. ‘The savage who is breaking the laws of his tribe has all 
his world—totems, tabus, earth, sky and all—against him. He cannot 
be at peace with God. 

The position of the hero or martyr who defies his tribe for the sake 
of what he thinks the truth or the right can easily be thought out on 
these lines. He defies this false temporary Cosmos in loyalty to the 
true and permanent Cosmos. 

See Durkheim, ‘ Les Formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse’, in 
Travaux de ? Année Soctologique, 1912; or G. Davy, ‘La Sociologie 
de M. Durkheim ’, in Rev. Philosophique, xxxvi, pp. 42-71 and 160-85. 


22 SATURNIA REGNA I 


a thoroughly orthodox member of any one of the 
million religious bodies that exist in the world must be 
clear in his mind that the other million minus one are 
wrong, if not wickedly wrong. That, I think, we must 
be clear about. Yet the fact remains that man must 
have some relation towards the uncharted, the mys- 
terious, tracts of life which surround him on every 
side. And for my own part I am content to say that 
his method must be to a large extent very much what 
St. Paul calls wiorts.or faith: that is, some attitude 
not of the conscious intellect but of the whole being, 
using all its powers of sensitiveness, all its feeblest and 
most inarticulate feelers and tentacles, in the effort 
somehow to touch by these that which cannot be 
grasped by the definite senses or analysed by the 
conscious reason. What we gain thus is an insecure 
but a precious possession. We gain no dogma, at least 
no safe dogma, but we gain much more. We gain 
something hard to define, which lies at the heart not 
only of religion, but of art and poetry and all the 
higher strivings of human emotion. I believe that 
at times we actually gain practical guidance in some 
questions where experience and argument fail.1 ‘That 


* I suspect that most reforms pass through this stage. A man 
somehow feels clear that some new course is, for him, right, though 
he cannot marshal the arguments convincingly in favour of it, and 
may even admit that the weight of obvious evidence is on the other 
side. We read of judges in the seventeenth century who believed 
that witches ought to be burned and that the persons before them 
were witches, and yet would not burn them—evidently under the 
influence of vague half-realized feelings. I know a vegetarian who 
thinks that, as far as he can see, carnivorous habits are not bad for 





I SATURNIA REGNA 23 


is a great work left for religion, but we must always 
remember two things about it: first, that the liability 
to error is enormous, indeed almost infinite; and 
second, that the results of confident error are very 
terrible. Probably throughout history the worst things 
ever done in the world on a large scale by decent people 
have been done in the name of religion, and I do not 
think that has entirely ceased to be true at the present 
day. All the Middle Ages held the strange and, to 
our judgement, the obviously insane belief that the 
normal result of religious error was eternal punishment. 
And yet by the crimes to which that false belief led 
them they almost proved the truth of something very 
like it. The record of early Christian and medieval 
persecutions which were the direct result of that one 
confident religious error comes curiously near to one’s 
conception of the wickedness of the damned. 


To turn to our immediate subject, I wish to put 
forward here what is still a rather new and unauthorized 
view of the development of Greek religion ; readers will 
forgive me if, in treating so vast a subject, I draw my 
outline very broadly, leaving out many qualifications, 
and quoting only a fragment of the evidence. 


human health and actually tend to increase the happiness of the species 
of animals eaten—as the adoption of Swift’s Modest Proposal would 
doubtless relieve the economic troubles of the human race, and yet 
feels clear that for him the ordinary flesh meal (or ‘ feasting on corpses ”) 
would ‘ partake of the nature of sin’. The path of progress is paved 
with inconsistencies, though it would be an error to imagine that the 
people who habitually reject any higher promptings that come to 
them are really any more consistent. 


i 
fi 


’ almost ineradicable error of treating Homer as primi- 


Py 


* 


24 SATURNIA REGNA 


The things that have misled us moderns in our 
efforts towards understanding the primitive stage in 


Greek religion have been first the widespread and 


tive, and more generally our unconscious insistence on 


‘starting with the notion of ‘Gods’. Mr. Hartland, in 


his address as president of one of the sections of the 
recent International Congress of Religions at Oxford,' 
dwelt on the significant fact about savage religions that 
wherever the word ‘ God ’ is used our trustiest witnesses 
tend to contradict one another. Among the best 
observers of the Arunta tribes, for instance, some hold 
that they have no conception of God, others that they 
are constantly thinking about God. The truth is that 
this idea of a god far away in the sky—I do not say 
merely a First Cause who is ‘ without body parts or 
passions ’, but almost any being that we should naturally 
call a ‘ god’—is an idea not easy for primitive man to 
grasp. It is a subtle and rarefied idea, saturated with 
ages of philosophy and speculation. And we must 
always remember that one of the chief religions of the 
world, Buddhism, has risen to great moral and intellec- 
tual heights without using the conception of God at all ; 
in his stead it has Dharma, the Eternal Law.? 

Apart from some few philosophers, both Christian 
and Moslem, the gods of the ordinary man have as 
a rule been as a matter of course anthropomorphic. 
Men did not take the trouble to try to conceive 
them otherwise. In many cases they have had the 


1 Transactions of the Third International Congress of Religions, Oxford, 
1908, pp. 26-7. 2 The Buddhist Dharma, by Mrs. Rhys Davids. 





I SATURNIA REGNA 25 


actual bodily shape of man; in almost all they have 
possessed—of course in their highest development— 
his mind and reason and his mental attributes. It 
causes most of us even now something of a shock to be 
told by a medieval Arab philosopher that to call God 
benevolent or righteous or to predicate of him any other 
human quality is just as Pagan and degraded as to say 
that he has a beard.t’ Now the Greek gods seem at first 
sight quite particularly solid and anthropomorphic. 
The statues and vases speak clearly, and they are mostly 
borne out by the literature. Of course we must dis- 
count the kind of evidence that misled Winckelmann, 
the mere Roman and Alexandrian art and mythology ; 
but even if we go back to the fifth century B. c. we shall 
find the ruling conceptions far nobler indeed, but still 
anthropomorphic. We find firmly established the 
Olympian patriarchal family, Zeus the Father of gods 
and men, his wife Hera, his son Apollo, his daughter 
Athena, his brothers Poseidon and Hades, and the rest. 
We probably think of each figure more or less as like 
a statue, a habit of mind obviously wrong and indeed 
absurd, as if one thought of * Labour’ and ‘ Grief’ as 
statues because Rodin or St. Gaudens has so represented 
them. And yet it was a habit into which the late 
Greeks themselves sometimes fell;* their arts of 
sculpture and painting as applied to religion had been 


1 See Die Mutaziliten, oder die Fretdenker 1m Islam, von H. Steiner, 
1865. This Arab was clearly under the influence of Plotinus or some 
other Neo-Platonist. 

* Cf. E. Reisch, Entstehung und Wandel griechischer Gottergestalten, 
Vienna, 1909. 

2960 D 


26 SATURNIA REGNA 


so dangerously successful: they sharpened and made 
vivid an anthropomorphism which in its origin had 
been mostly the result of normal-_human_taziness. ‘he 
process of making winds and rivers into anthropomor- 
phic gods is, for the most part, not the result of using 
the imagination with special vigour. It is the result of 
not doing so. The wind is obviously alive; any fool 
can see that. Being alive, it blows; how? why, 
naturally ; just as you and I blow. It knocks things 
down, it shouts and dances, it whispers and talks. 
And, unless we are going to make a great effort of the 
imagination and try to realize, like a scientific man, 
just what really happens, we naturally assume that it 
does these things in the normal way, in the only way 
we know. Even when you worship a beast or a stone, 
you practically anthropomorphize it. It happens in- 
deed to have a perfectly clear shape, so you accept 
that. But it talks, acts, and fights just like a man—as 
you can see from the Australian Folk Tales published 
by Mrs. Langloh Parker—because you do not take 
the trouble to think out any other way of behaving. 
This kind of anthropomorphism—or as Mr. Gladstone 
used to call it, ‘anthropophuism ’—‘ humanity of 
nature >—1is primitive and inevitable: the sharp-cut 
statue type of god is different, and is due in Greece 
directly to the work of the artists. 

We must get back behind these gods of the artist’s 
workshop and the romance-maker’s imagination, and 
see if the religious thinkers of the great period use, or 
imply, the same highly human conceptions. We shall 
find Parmenides telling us that God coincides with the 


I SATURNIA REGNA 27 


universe, which is a sphere and immovable ;1 Heracli- 
tus, that God is ‘ day night, summer winter, war peace, 
satietyhunger’. Xenophanes, that God is all-seeing, all- 
hearing, and all mind ; ® and as for his supposed human 
shape, why, if bulls and lions were to speak about God 
they would jdoubtless tell us that he was a bull or a lion.® 
We must notice the instinctive language of the poets, 
using the word @eds in many subtle senses for which 
our word ‘God’ is too stiff, too personal, and too 
anthropomorphic. T6 edruyetv, ‘the fact of success’, 
is “a god and more than a god’; 76 yryvdaokewv dirovs, 
‘the thrill of recognizing a friend’ after long absence, 
is a ‘god’; wine is a ‘ god’ whose body is poured out 
in libation to gods; and in the unwritten law of the 
human conscience ‘ a great god liveth and groweth not 
old’. You will say that is mere poetry or philosophy : 
it represents a particular theory or a particular meta- 
phor. Ithinknot. Language of this sort is used widely 
and without any explanation or apology. It was 
evidently understood and’ felt to be natural by the 


1 Parm. Fr. 8, 3-7 (Diels?). 
2 Xen. Fr. 24 (Diels?). 
$ Xen, Fr, 15. 
4 Aesch. Cho. 60; Eur. Hel. 560; Bac. 284; Soph. O.f. 871. 
Cf. also 1) ppdvycis dyaby Geds péeyas. Soph. Fr. 836, 2 (Nauck). 
6 wAovros, avOpwriake, Tots copois Feds. Eur. Cycl, 316. 
6 vods yap Hpav éorw év éxdorw eds. Eur. Fr. 1018. 
pOdvos Kaxirros Kadixwraros Geds. Hippothodn Fr. 2. 
A certain moment of time: dpy7 kal eds ev dvOparois idpupevn cwler 
mavra. Pl. Leg. 775 5. 
7a papa yap tavr’ éeariv "Adpodity Bporois. Eur. Tro. 989. 
HArGev Se Sais Oddeva mpecBiory Gedy. Soph. Fr. 548. 


28 SATURNIA REGNA I 


audience. If it is metaphorical, all metaphors have 
grown from the soil of current thought and normal 
experience. And without going into the point at 
length I think we may. safely conclude that the soil 
from which such language as this grew was not any 
system of clear-cut personal anthropomorphic theology. 
No doubt any of these poets, if he had to make a picture 
of one of these utterly formless Gods, would have given 
him a human form. That was the recognized symbol, 
as a veiled woman is St. Gaudens’s symbol for ‘ Grief’. 


But we have other evidence too which shows abun- 
dantly that these Olympian gods are not primary, but 
are imposed upon a background strangely unlike them- 
selves. For a long time their luminous figures dazzled 
our eyes ; we were not able to see the half-lit regions 
behind them, the dark primeval tangle of desires and 
fears and dreams from which they drew their vitality. 
The surest test to apply in this question is the evidence 
of actual cult. Miss Harrison has here shown us the 
right method, and following her we will begin with 
the three great festivals of Athens, the Diasia, the 
Thesmophoria, and the Anthesteria.1- 

The Diasia was said to be the chief festival of 
Zeus, the central figure of the Olympians, though our 
authorities generally add an epithet to him, and call 
him Zeus Meilichios, Zeus of Placation. A god 
with an ‘epithet’ is always suspicious, like a human 

1 See J. E. Harrison, Prolegomena, i, ii, iv; Mommsen, Feste der 


Stadt Athen, 1898, pp. 308-22 (Thesmophoria), 384-404 (Anthesteria), 
421-6 (Diasia). See also Pauly-Wissowa, s. v. 





I SATURNIA REGNA 29 


being with an ‘alias’. Miss Harrison’s examination 
(Prolegomena, pp. 28 ff.) shows that in the rites Zeus 
has no place at all. Meilichios from the beginning has 
a fairly secure one. On some of the reliefs Meilichios 
appears not as a god, but as an enormous bearded 
snake, a well-known representation of underworld 
powers or dead ancestors. Sometimes the great snake 
is alone; sometimes he rises gigantic above the small 
human worshippers approaching him. And then, in 
certain reliefs, his old barbaric presence vanishes, and 
we have instead a benevolent and human father of gods 
and men, trying, as Miss Harrison somewhere expresses 
it, to look as if he had been there all the time. 

‘There was a sacrifice at the Diasia, but it was not a 
sacrifice given to Zeus. ‘To Zeus and all the heavenly 
gods men gave sacrifice in the form of a feast, in which 
the god had his portion and the worshippers theirs. 
The two parties cemented their friendship and feasted 
happily together. But the sacrifice at the Diasia was 
a holocaust: + every shred of the victim was burnt to 
ashes, that no man might partake of it. We know 
quite well the meaning of that form of sacrifice: it 
is a sacrifice to placate or appease the powers below, 
the Chthonioi, the dead and the lords of death. It 
was performed, as our authorities tell us, wera orvyvo- 
TnTos, with shuddering or repulsion.” 

The Diasia was a ritual of placation, that is, of casting 
away various elements of pollution or danger and 
appeasing the unknown wraths of the surrounding 


1 Prolegomena, p. 15 f. 
2 Luc. Lcaro-Menippos 24 schol. ad loc. 


30 SATURNIA REGNA I 


darkness. The nearest approach to a god contained 
in this festival is Meilichios, and Meilichios, as we shall 
see later, belongs to a particular class of shadowy beings 
who are built up out of ritual services. His name means 
‘He of appeasement’, and he is nothing else. He is 
merely the personified shadow or dream generated 
by the emotion of the ritual—very much, to take a 
familiar instance, as Father Christmas is a ‘ projection ’ 
of our Christmas customs. 


The Thesmophoria formed the great festival of 
Demeter and her daughter Koré, though here again 
Demeter appears with a clinging epithet, Thesmo- 
phoros. We know pretty clearly the whole course of 
the ritual: there is the carrying by women of certain 
magic charms, fir-cones and snakes and unnameable 
objects made of paste, to ensure fertility; there is 
a sacrifice of pigs, who were thrown into a deep cleft 
of the earth, and their remains afterwards collected 
and scattered as a charm over the fields. ‘There is 
more magic ritual, more carrying of sacred objects, 
a fast followed by a rejoicing, a disappearance of life 
below the earth, and a rising again of life above it; 
but it is hard to find definite traces of any personal 
goddess. ‘The Olympian Demeter and Persephone 
dwindle away as we look closer, and we are left with 
the shadow Thesmophoros, ‘ She who carries Thesmoi ’, 


1 Frequently dual, ra @ecpopdpw, under the influence of the 
‘Mother and Maiden’ idea: Dittenberger Inscr. Sylloge 628, Ar. 
Thesm. 84, 296 et passim. ‘The plural ai @ecpoddpor used in late 
Greek is not, as one might imagine, a projection from the whole 








I SATURNIA REGNA 31 


not a substantive personal goddess, but merely a 
personification of the ritual itself: an imaginary 
Charm-bearer generated by so much charm-bearing, 
just as Meilichios in the Diasia was generated from 
the ritual of appeasement. 

Now the Diasia were dominated by a sacred snake. 
Is there any similar divine animal in the Thesmophoria? 
Alas, yes. Both here, and still more markedly in the 
mysteries of Demeter and Persephone at Eleusis, we 
regularly find the most lovely of all goddesses, Demeter 
and Persephone, habitually—I will not say represented 
by, but dangerously associated with, a sacred Sow. 
A Pig is the one animal in Greek religion that actually 
had sacrifice made to it." 


The third feast, the Anthesteria, belongs in classical 
times to the Olympian Dionysus, and is said to be the 
oldest of his feasts. On the surface there is a touch of 
the wine-god, and he is given due official prominence ; 
but as soon as we penetrate anywhere near the heart of 
the festival, Dionysus and his brother gods are quite 
forgotten, and all that remains is a great ritual for 
appeasing the dead. All the days of the Feast were 


band of worshippers ; it is merely due to the disappearance of the 
dual from Greek. I accept provisionally the derivation of these 
Geopoi from Geo- in béocacbat, Oeoparos, Pécxedos, roAVGerTos, a7rd- 
Oecros, &c.: cf. A. W. Verrallin 7. H. S. xx, p. 114; and Prolegomena, 
pp. 48 ff., 136 f. But, whatever the derivation, the Thesmoi were the 
objects carried. 

1 Frazer, Golden Bough, ii. 44 ff. ; A. B. Cook, 7. H.S. xiv, pp. 153- 
4; J. E. Harrison, Themis, p. 5. See also A. Lang, Homeric Hymns, 


1899, p. 63. 


32 SATURNIA REGNA 


néfasti, of ill omen; the first day especially was és 70 
mav amodpas. On it the Wine Jars which were also 
Seed and Funeral Jars were opened and the spirits of 
the Dead let loose in the world.t. Nameless and in- 
numerable, the ghosts are summoned out of their 
tombs, and are duly feasted, each man summoning his 
own ghosts to his own house, and carefully abstaining 
from any act that would affect his neighbours. And 
then, when they are properly appeased and made 
gentle, they are swept back again out of this world 
to the place where they properly belong, and the 
streets and houses cleaned from the presence of death. 
There is one central stage indeed in which Dionysus 
does seem to appear. And he appears in a very 
significant way, to conduct a Sacred Marriage. For, 
why do you suppose the dead are summoned at all? 
What use to the tribe is the presence of all these 
dead ancestors? ‘They have come, I suspect, to be 
born again, to begin a new life at the great Spring 
festival. For the new births of the tribe, the new 
crops, the new kids, the new human beings, are of 
course really only the old ones returned to earth.? 
The important thing is to get them properly placated 
and purified, free from the contagion of ancient sin or 
underworld anger. For nothing is so dangerous as the 
presence of what I may call raw ghosts. The Anthes- 
teria contained, like other feasts of the kind, a tepds 


1 Feste der Stadt Athen, p. 390f. On Seed Jars, Wine Jars and 
Funeral Jars, see Themis, pp. 276-88, and Warde Fowler, Mundus 
Patet, in Journ. Roman Studies, ii, p. 25 ff. Cf. below, p. 43 f. 

* Dieterich, Muttererde, 1905, p. 48 f. 


I SATURNIA REGNA 33 


yapos, or Holy Marriage, between the wife of the 
Basileus or Sacred King, and the imaginary god.! 
Whatever reality there ever was in the ceremony has 
apparently by classical times faded away. But the 
place where the god received his bride is curious. It 
was called the Boukolion, or Bull’s Shed. It was not 
originally the home of an anthropomorphic god, but 
of a divine animal. 


Thus in each of these great festivals we find that the 
Olympian gods vanish away, and we are left with three 
things only: first, withan atmosphere of religious dread ; 
second, with a whole sequence of magical ceremonies 
which, in two at least of the three cases,” produce 


1 Dr. Frazer, The Magic Art, ii. 137, thinks it not certain that the 
yapos took place during the Anthesteria, at the same time as the oath 
of the yeparpat. Without the ydpos, however, it is hard to see what 
the BactAwva and yepatpai had to do in the festival ; and this is the 
view of Mommsen, Feste der Stadt Athen, pp. 391-3 3; Gruppe in Iwan 
Miller, Mythologie und Religtonsgeschichte, i. 33 ; Farnell, Cults, v. 217. 

2 One might perhaps say, in allthree. ’Av@/crnpos rod Iv6oxpyarod 
xowvov is the name of a society of worshippers in the island of Thera, 
I. G. I, iti. 329. This gives a god Anthister, who is clearly identified 
with Dionysus, and seems to be a projection of a feast Anthisteria = 
Anthesteria. The inscription is of the second century B. c. and it seems 
likely that Anthister—-Anthisteria, with their clear derivation from 
avOifew, are corruptions of the earlier and difficult forms ’Av@éornp- 
’AvOeornpia. It is noteworthy that Thera, an island lying rather 
outside the main channels of civilization, kept up throughout its history 
a tendency to treat the ‘epithet’ as a full person. Hikesios and 
Koures come very early ; also Polieus and Stoichaios without the name 
Zeus ; Delphinios, Karneios, Aiglatas, and Aguieus without Apollo. 

See Hiller von Gaertringen in the Festschrift fiir O. Benndorff, 
p- 228. Also Nilsson, Griechische Feste, 1906, p. 267, n. 5. 

2960 E 


34 SATURNIA REGNA 1 


a kind of strange personal emanation of themselves, 
the Appeasements producing Meilichios, the Charm- 
bearings Thesmophoros ; and thirdly, with a divine or 
sacred animal. In the Diasia we find the old super- 
human snake,who reappears so ubiquitously throughout 
~ Greece, the regular symbol of the underworld powers, 
especially the hero or dead ancestor. Why the snake 
was so chosen we can only surmise. He obviously lived . 
underground : his home was among the Chthonioi, the 
Earth-People. Also, says the Scholiast to Aristophanes 
(Plut. 533), he was a type of new birth because he 
throws off his old skin and renews himself. And if that 
in itself is not enough to show his supernatural power, 
what normal earthly being could send his enemies to 
death by one little pin-prick, as some snakes can? 

In the Thesmophoria we found sacred swine, and the 
reason given by the ancients is no doubt the right one. 
The sow is sacred because of its fertility, and possibly 
as practical people we should add, because of its cheap- 
ness. Swine are always prominent in Greek agricul- 
tural rites. And the bull? Well, we modern town- 
dwellers have almost forgotten what a real bull is like. 
For so many centuries we have tamed him and penned 
him in, and utterly deposed him from his place as lord 
of the forest. The bull was the chief of magic or 
sacred animals in Greece, chief because of his enormous 
strength, his size, his rage, in fine, as anthropologists 
call it, his mana; that primitive word which comprises 
force, vitality, prestige, holiness, and power of magic, 
and which may belong equally to a lion, a chief, a 
medicine-man, or a battle-axe. 





SATURNIA REGNA 35 


Now in the art and the handbooks these sacred 
animals have all been adopted into the Olympian 
system. ‘They appear regularly as the ‘ attributes’ of 
particular gods. Zeus is merely accompanied by a snake, 
an eagle, a bull, or at worst assumes for his private 
purposes the forms of those animals. The cow and the 
cuckoo are sacred to Hera; the owl and the snake to 
Athena ; the dolphin, the crow, the lizard, the bull, to 
Apollo. Dionysus, always like a wilder and less middle- 
aged Zeus, appears freely as a snake, bull, he-goat, and 
lion. Allowing for some isolated exceptions, the safest 
rule in all these cases 1s that the attribute is original and 
the god is added.’ It comes out very clearly in the 
case of the snake and the bull. The tremendous mana 
of the wild bull indeed occupies almost half the stage 
of pre-Olympian ritual. The religion unearthed by 
Dr. Evans in Crete is permeated by the bull of Minos. 
The heads and horns are in almost every sacred room 
and on every altar. The great religious scene depicted 
on the sarcophagus of Hagia Triada* centres in the 
holy blood that flows from the neck of a captive and 
dying bull. Down into classical times bull’s blood 
was a sacred thing which it was dangerous to touch and 
death to taste: to drink a cup of it was the most heroic 


1 Miss Harrison, ‘ Bird and Pillar Worship in relation to Ouranian 
Divinities ’, Transactions of the Third International Congress for the 
History of Religion, Oxford, 1908, vol. ii, p. 154; Farnell, Greece and 
Babylon, 1911, pp. 66 ff. 

2 First published by R. Paribeni, ‘Il Sarcofago dipinto di Hagia 
Triada’, in Monumenti antichi della R. Accademia det Lincet, xix, 
1908, p. 6, T. i-iii. See also Themis, pp. 158 ff. 


36 SATURNIA REGNA I 


form of suicide! The sacrificial bull at Delphi was 
called Hosiétér: he was not merely hostos, holy; he 
was Hosiétér, the Sanctifier, He who maketh Holy. It 
was by contact with him that holiness was spread to 
others. Ona coin and a vase, cited by Miss Harrison,” 
we have a bull entering a holy cave and a bull standing 
in a shrine. We have holy pillars whose holiness con- 
sists in the fact that they have been touched with the 
blood of a bull. We have a long record of a bull-ritual 
at Magnesia,* in which Zeus, though he makes a kind of 
external claim to be lord of the feast, dare not claim that 
the bull is sacrificed to him. Zeus has a ram to himself 
and stands apart, showing but a weak and shadowy 
figure beside the original Holy One. We have immense 
masses of evidence about the religion of Mithras, at 
one time the most serious rival of Christianity, which 
sought its hope and its salvation in the blood of a 
divine bull. 

Now what is the origin of this conception of the 
sacred animal? It was first discovered and explained 
with almost prophetic insight by Dr. Robertson 
Smith.* The origin is what he calls a sacramental 
feast: you eat the flesh and drink the blood of the 
divine animal in order—here I diverge from Robertson 
Smith’s language—to get into you his mana, his 
vital power. ‘The classical instance is the sacramental 


* Ar. Equites, 82-4—or possibly of apotheosis. See Themis, p. 154, 
ni, 2 Themis, p. 145, fig, 25; and p, 152, fig. 28 b. 

° O. Kern, Lnschriften v. Magnesia, No. 98, discussed by O. Kern, 
Arch. Anz, 1894, p. 78, and Nilsson, Griechische Feste, p. 23. 

* Religion of the Semites, 1901, p. 338; Reuterskiold, in Archiv f. 
Relig, xv. 1-23. 


I SATURNIA REGNA i 


eating of a camel by an Arab tribe, recorded in the 
works of St. Nilus.t The camel was devoured on 
a particular day at the rising of the morning star. He 
was cut to pieces alive, and every fragment of him had 
to be consumed before the sun rose. If the life had 
once gone out of the flesh and blood the sacrifice would 
have been spoilt ; it was the spirit, the vitality, of the 
camel that his tribesmen wanted. The only serious 
error that later students have found in Robertson 
Smith’s statement is that he spoke too definitely of 
the sacrifice as affording communion with the tribal 
god. ‘There was no god there, only the raw material 
out of which gods are made. You devoured the holy 
animal to get its mana, its swiftness, its strength, its 
great endurance, just as the savage now will eat his 
enemy’s brain or heart or hands to get some particular 
quality residing there. The imagination of the pre- 
Hellenic tribes was evidently dominated above all 
things by the bull, though there were other sacramental 
feasts too, combined with sundry horrible rendings 
and drinkings of raw blood. It is strange to think that 
even small things like kids and fawns and hares should 
have struck primitive man as having some uncanny 
vitality which he longed for, or at least some uncanny 
power over the weather or the crops. Yet to him it 
no doubt appeared obvious. Frogs, for instance, could 
always bring rain by croaking for it, and who can limit 
the powers and the knowledge of birds ? ” 


1 Nili Opera, Narrat. iii. 28. 
* See Aristophanes’ Birds, e. g. 685-736: cf. the practice of augury 
from birds, and the art-types of Winged Kéres, Victories and Angels. 


38 SATURNIA REGNA I 


Here comes a difficulty. If the Olympian god was 
not there to start with, how did he originate ? We can 
understand—at least after a course of anthropology— 
this desire of primitive man to acquire for himself the 
superhuman forces of the bull; but how does he make 
the transition from the real animal to the imaginary 
human god? First let us remember the innate ten- 
dency of primitive man everywhere, and not especially 
in Greece, to imagine a personal cause, like himself in 
all points not otherwise specified, for every striking 
phenomenon. If the wind blows it is because some 
being more or less human, though of course super- 
human, is blowing with his cheeks. If a tree is struck 
by lightning it is because some one has thrown his 
battle-axe at it. In some Australian tribes there is no 
belief in natural death. If a man dies it is because 
‘bad man kill that fellow’. St. Paul, we may remem- 
ber, passionately summoned the heathen to refrain 
from worshipping ry xriow, the creation, and go back 
to rév Kricavra, the creator, human and masculine. It 
was as a rule a road that they were only too ready 
to travel. 

But this tendency was helped by a second factor. 
Research has shown us the existence in early Mediter- 
ranean religion of a peculiar transitional step, a man 
wearing the head or skin of a holy beast. The 
Egyptian gods are depicted as men with beasts’ heads : 
that is, the best authorities tell us, their shapes are 
derived from the kings and priests who on great 
occasions of sacrifice covered their heads with a beast- 


1 Romans, i. 25 viii. 20-3. 


_ SATURNIA REGNA 39 


mask.' Minos, with his projection the Minotaur, was 
a bull-god and wore a bull-mask. From early Island 
gems, from a fresco at Mycenae, from Assyrian reliefs, 
Mr. A. B. Cook has collected many examples of this 
mixed figure—a man wearing the protomé, or mask and 
mane, of a beast. Sometimes we can actually see him 
offering libations. Sometimes the worshipper has 
become so closely identified with his divine beast 
that he is represented not as a mere man wearing the 
protomé of a lion or bull, but actually as a lion or bull 
wearing the protomé of another.” Hera, Booms, with 
a cow’s head; Athena, yhaveoms, with an owl’s head, 
or bearing on her breast the head of the Gorgon ; 
Heracles clad in a lion’s skin and covering his brow dew@ 
xaopart Onpos, * with the awful spread jaws of the wild 
beast’, belong to the same class. So does the Dadouchos 
at Eleusis and other initiators who let candidates for 
purification set one foot—one only and that the left— 
on the skin of a sacrificial ram, and called the skin Atés 
Kas, the fleece not of a ram, but of Zeus.® 

The mana of the slain beast is in the hide and head 
and blood and fur, and the man who wants to be in 
thorough contact with the divinity gets inside the skin 

1 Lang, Myth, Ritual, and Religion, 1906, ii. 284; ibid., 130; Moret, 
Caractére religieux de la Monarchie Egyptienne ; Dieterich, Mithras- 
liturgie, 1903. 

2 A. B. Cook in ¥. H. S. 1894, ‘ Animal Worship in the Mycenaean 
Age’. See also Hogarth on the ‘ Zakro Sealings’, ‘f.H. S. 1902 ; these 
seals show a riot of fancy in the way of mixed monsters, starting in all 
probability from the simpler form. See the quotation from Robertson 
Smith in Hogarth, p. 91. 

3 Feste der Stadt Athen, p. 416. 


40 SATURNIA REGNA 1 
and wraps himself deep in it. He begins by being 


a man wearing a lion’s skin: he ends, as we have seen, 
by feeling himself to be a lion wearing a lion’s skin. 
And who is this man ? He may on particular occasions 
be only a candidate for purification or initiation. But 
par excellence he who has the right is the priest, the 
medicine-man, the divine king. If an old suggestion 
of my own is right, he is the original Qeds or Beads, the 
incarnate medicine or spell or magic power.’ He at 
first, | suspect, is the only Oeds_or ‘God’ that his 
society knows. We commonly speak of ancient kings | 
being ‘ deified’ ; we regard the process as due to an 
outburst of superstition or insane flattery. And so no 
doubt it sometimes was, especially in later times—when 
man and god were felt as two utterly distinct things. 
But * deification’ is an unintelligent and misleading 
word. What we call ‘ deification ’ is only the survival 
of this undifferentiated human eds, with his mana, his 
xpatos and Bia, his control of the weather, the rain and 
the thunder, the spring crops and the autumn floods ; 
his knowledge of what was lawful and what was not, and 
his innate power to curse or to ‘ make dead’. Recent 
researchers have shown us in abundance the early 
Greek medicine-chiefs making thunder and lightning 
and rain.” We have long known the king as possessor 
of Dike and Themis, of justice and tribal custom ; we 
have known his effect on the fertility of the fields and 


1 Anthropology and the Classics, 1908, pp. 77, 78. 

2 A. B. Cook, Class. Rev. xvii, pp. 275 ff.; A. J. Reinach, Rev. de 
VP Hist. des Religions, \x, p. 178; S. Reinach, Cultes, Mythes, &8c., ii. 
160-6. 


SATURNIA REGNA 41 


the tribes, and the terrible results of a king’s sin or a 
king’s sickness.’ 

What is the subsequent history of this medicine- 
chief or Oeds? He is differentiated, as it were: the 
' visible part of him becomes merely human; the sup- 
posed supernatural part grows into what we should 
call a God. The process is simple. Any particular 
“medicine-man is bound to have his failures. As 
Dr. Frazer gently reminds us, every single pretension 
which he puts forth on every day of his life is a lie, and 
liable sooner or later to be found out. Doubtless men 
are tender to their own delusions. ‘They do not at once 
condemn the medicine-chief as a fraudulent institution, 
but they tend gradually to say that he is not the 
real all-powerful @eds. He is only his representative. 
The real @eos, tremendous, infallible, is somewhere far 
away, hidden in clouds perhaps, on the summit of some 
inaccessible mountain. Ifthe mountain is once climbed 
the god will move to the upper sky. The medicine- 
chief meanwhile stays on earth, still influential. He 
has some connexion with the great god more intimate 
than that of other men ; at worst he possesses the god’s 
sacred instruments, his tepa or opyta; he knows the 
rules for approaching him and making prayers to him. 

There is therefore a path open from the divine 
beast to the anthropomorphic god. From beings like 

1 One may suggest in passing that this explains the enormous 
families attributed to many sacred kings of Greek legend: why Priam 
or Danaus have their fifty children, and Heracles, most prolific of all, 
his several hundred. ‘The particular numbers chosen, however, are 


probably due to other causes, e.g. the fifty moon-months of the 


Penteteris. 
2960 F 


42 SATURNIA REGNA I 


Thesmophoros and Meilichios the road is of course 
much easier. ‘They are already more than half anthro- 
pomorphic ; they only lack the concreteness, the lucid 
shape and the detailed personal history of the Olym- 
pians. In this connexion we must not forget the 
power of hallucination, still fairly strong, as the history 
of religious revivals in America will bear witness,’ 
but far stronger, of course, among the impressionable 
hordes of early men. ‘ The god ’, says M. Doutté in his 
profound study of» Algerian magic, ‘c’est le deésir 
collectif personnifié’, the collective desire projected, 
as it were, or personified.? Think of the gods who have 
appeared in great crises of battle, created sometimes 
by the desperate desire of men who have for years 
prayed to them, and who are now at the last extremity 
for lack of their aid, sometimes by the confused and 
excited remembrances of the survivors after the victory. 
The gods who led the Roman charge at Lake Regillus,® 
the gigantic figures that were seen fighting before the. 
Greeks at Marathon,* even the celestial signs that 
promised Constantine victory for the cross : —these 
are the effects of great emotion: we can all understand 
them. But even in daily life primitive men seem to have 
dealt more freely than we generally do with apparitions 

1 See Primitive Traits in Religious Revivals, by F. M. wae 
New York, 1906. 

2 E. Doutté, Magie et religion dans ? Afrique du Nord, 1909, p. 601. 

® Cicero, de Nat. Deorum, ii. 2; iii. 5,6; Florus, ii. 12. 

4 Plut. Theseus, 35; Paus. i. 32. 5. Herodotus only mentions 
a bearded and gigantic figure who struck Epizelos blind (vi. 117). 


° Eusebius, zt. Constant., 1.1, cc. 28, 29, 30; Nazarius inter Panegyr. 
AT AE AN UWA 9p 


I SATURNIA REGNA 43 


and voices and daemons of every kind. One of the most 
remarkable and noteworthy sources for this kind of 
hallucinatory god in early societies is a social custom 
that we have almost forgotten, the religious Dance. 
‘When the initiated young men of Crete or elsewhere 
danced at night over the mountains in the Oreibasia or 
Mountain Walk they not only did things that seemed 
beyond their ordinary workaday strength; they also felt 
themselves led on and on by some power which guided 
and sustained them. ‘This daemon has no necessary 
name: a man may be named after him ‘ Oreibasius ’, 
‘Belonging to the Mountain Dancer’, just as others 
may be named ‘ Apollonius’ or * Dionysius’. ‘The god 
is only the spirit of the Mountain Dance, Oreibates, 
though of course he is absorbed at different times in 
various Olympians. There is one god called Aphiktor, 
the Suppliant, He who prays for mercy. He is just 
the projection, as M. Doutté would say, of the intense 
emotion of one of those strange processions well known 
in the ancient world, bands of despairing men or women 
who have thrown away all means of self-defence and 
join together at some holy place in one passionate 
prayer for pity. The highest of all gods, Zeus, was 
the special patron of the suppliant ; and it is strange 
and instructive to find that Zeus the all-powerful 
is actually identified with this Aphiktor: Zeds pev 
"Adixtwp emido. tpodpdvas.' ‘The assembled prayer, 
the united cry that rises from the oppressed of the 

1 Aesch. Suppl. 1, cf. 478 Zeds txryp. Rise of the Greek Epic %, 


p. 275 n. Adjectival phrases like Zeds ‘Ixéovos, ‘Ikerijovos, Ixratos are 
common and call for no remark. 


44 SATURNIA REGNA I 


world, is itself grown to be a god, and the greatest 
god. A similar projection arose from the dance of the 
Kouroi, or initiate youths, in the dithyramb—the magic 
dance which was to celebrate, or more properly, to 
hasten and strengthen, the coming on of spring. ‘That 
dance projected the Megistos Kouros, the greatest of 
youths, who is the incarnation of spring or the return 
of life, and lies at the back of so many of the most 
gracious shapes of the classical pantheon. The Kouros 
appears as Dionysus, as Apollo, as Hermes, as Ares: 
in our clearest and most detailed piece of evidence he 
actually appears with the characteristic history and 
attributes of Zeus.’ 

This spirit of the dance, who leads it or personifies 
its emotion, stands more clearly perhaps than any 
other daemon half-way between earth and heaven. A 
number of difficult passages in Euripides’ Bacchae and 
other Dionysiac literature find their explanations when 
we realize how the god is in part merely identified with 
the inspired chief dancer, in part he is the intangible 
projected incarnation of the emotion of the dance. 


‘The collective desire personified ’ : on what does the 
collective desire, or collective dread, of the primitive 
community chiefly concentrate ? On two things, the 
_ food-supply and the tribe-supply, the desire not to die 
of famine and not to be harried or conquered by the 
neighbouring tribe. The fertility of the earth and the 
fertility of the tribe, these two are felt in early religion 


1 Hymn of the Kouretes, Themis, passim. 


ee a a 


SATURNIA REGNA 45 


as one.’ ‘The earth is a mother: the human mother 
is an apoupa, or ploughed field. This earth-mother is 
the characteristic and central feature of the early 
Aegean religions. ‘The introduction of agriculture 
made her a mother of fruits and corn, and it is in that 
form that we best know her. But in earlier days she 
had been a mother of the spontaneous growth of the 
soil, of wild beasts and trees and all the life of the 
mountain.” In early Crete she stands with lions erect 
on either side of her or with snakes held in her hands 
and coiled about her body. And as the earth is mother 
when the harvest comes, so in spring she is maiden 
or Koré, but a maiden fated each year to be wedded 
and made fruitful ; and earlier still there has been the 
terrible time when fields are bare and lifeless. ‘The 
Koré has been snatched away underground, among the 
dead peoples, and men must wait expectant till the 
first buds begin to show and they call her to rise again 
with the flowers. Meantime earth as she brings 
forth vegetation in spring is Kourotrophos, rearer of 
Kouroi, or the young men of the tribe. The nymphs 
and rivers are all Kourotrophoi. ‘The Moon is 
Kourotrophos. She quickens the young of the tribe 


1 See in general I. King, The Development of Religion, 1910; EF. J. 
Payne, History of the New World, 1892, p. 414. Also Dieterich, 
Muttererde, esp. pp. 37-58. 

2 See Dieterich, Muttererde, J. E. Harrison, Prolegomena, chap. vi, 
‘The Making of a Goddess’? ; Themis, chap. vi, ‘’ The Spring Drome- 
non’, As to the prehistoric art-type of this goddess technically called 
‘steatopygous ’, I cannot refrain from suggesting that it may be 
derived from a mountain A turned into a human figure, as the palladion 
or figure-8 type came from two round shields. See p. 73. 


46 SATURNIA REGNA I 


in their mother’s womb ; at one terrible hour especially 
she is ‘ a lion to women’ who have offended against her 
holiness. She also marks the seasons of sowing and 
ploughing, and the due time for the ripening of 
crops. When men learn to calculate in longer units, 
the Sun appears: they turn to the Sun for their 
calendar, and at all times of course the Sun has been 
a power in agriculture. He is not called Kourotrophos, 
but the Young Sun returning after winter is himself 
a Kouros,' and all the Kouroi have some touch of the 
Sun in them. The Cretan Spring-song of the Kouretes 
prays for véou woXtrat, young citizens, quite simply ~ 
among the other gifts of the spring.” 

This is best shown by the rites of tribal initiation, 
which seem normally to have formed part of the spring 
Dromena or sacred performances. ‘The Kouroi, as we 
have said, are the initiated young men. ‘They pass 
through their initiation; they become no longer matdes, 
boys, but advdpes, men. ‘The actual name Kouros is 
possibly connected with xe/peu, to shave,*and may mean 
that after this ceremony they first cut their long hair. 


1 Hymn Orph. 8, 10 oporpode Kodpe. 

2 For the order in which men generally proceed in worship, turning 
their attention to (1) the momentary incidents of weather, rain, 
sunshine, thunder, &c.; (2) the Moon; (3) the Sun and stars, see 
Payne, History of the New World called America, vol. i, p. 474, cited by 
Miss Harrison, Themis, p. 390. 

3 On the subject of Initiations see Webster, Primitive Secret Societies, 
New York, 1908; Schurtz, Altersklassen und Mannerbunde, Berlin, 
1902; Van Gennep, Rites de Passage, Paris, 1909; Nilsson, Grundlage 
des Spartanischen Lebens in Klio xii (1912), pp. 308-40; Themis, 
Pp. 337,n.1. Since the above, Rivers, Social Organization, 1924. 


SATURNIA REGNA 47 


Till then the xovpos is axepoexouns—with hair un- 
shorn. ‘They have now open to them the two roads 
that belong to avdpes alone: they have the work of 
begetting children for the tribe, and the work of killing 
the tribe’s enemies in battle. 

The classification of people according to their age is 
apt to be sharp and vivid in primitive communities. 
We, for example, think of an old man as a kind of man 
and an old woman as a kind of woman ; but in primitive 
peoples as soon as a man and woman cease to be able 
to perform his and her due tribal functions they cease 
to be men and women, avdpes and yuvatkes: the 
ex-man becomes a yépwy; the ex-woman a ypavs.’ 
We distinguish between ‘ boy’ and ‘ man’, between 
‘girl’ and ‘woman’; but apart from the various 
words for baby, Attic Greek would have four sharp 
divisions, wats, ébnBos, avyp, yépwv.” In Sparta the 
divisions are still sharper and more numerous, cen- 
tring in the great initiation ceremonies of the Iranes, 
or full-grown youths, to the goddess «alled Orthia 
or Bortheia.2 These initiation ceremonies are called 


1 Cf. Dr. Rivers on mate, ‘ Primitive Conception of Death’, Hibbert 
Fournal, January 1912, p. 393. 
2 Cf. Cardinal Virtues, Pindar, Nem. 111. 72: 
év Talgl veolwl Tats, év advopaow avyp, TpiTOV 
év wraAawrepourt p.épos, €KacTov olov éxopev 
Bporeov €Ovos. éda O€ Kal Técoapas dperas 
6 Ovaros aidy, 
also Pindar, Pyth. iv. 281. 
3 See Woodward in B. S. A. xiv, 83. Nikagoras won four (suc- 
cessive ?) victories as puxktyiCopevos, mporais, mats, and pedAcipny, 
i. e. from his tenth to fifteenth year. He would then at 14 or 15 become 


48 SATURNIA REGNA I 


Teletai, ‘completions’: they mark the great ‘ rite 
of transition’ from the immature, charming, but half 
useless thing which we call boy or girl, to the rédevos 
avyp, the full member of the tribe as fighter or 
counsellor, or to the veketa yur, the full wife and 
mother. This whole subject of Greek initiation 
ceremonies calls pressingly for more investigation. It 
is only in the last few years that we have obtained the 
material for understanding them, and the whole mass 
of the evidence needs re-treatment. For one instance, 
it is clear that a great number of rites which were 
formerly explained as remnants of human sacrifice are 
simply ceremonies of initiation.’ 

At the great spring Drémenon the tribe and the 
growing earth were renovated together: the earth 
arises afresh from her dead seeds, the tribe from its 
dead ancestors ; and the whole process, charged as it is 
with the emotion of pressing human desire, projects its 
anthropomorphic god or daemon. A vegetation-spirit 
we call him, very inadequately ; he is a divine Kouros, 
a Year-Daemon, a spirit that in the first stage is living, 
then dies with each year, then thirdly rises again from 
the dead, raising the whole dead world with him—the 
Greeks called him in this phase ‘ the Third One ’, or the 
‘Saviour’. The renovation ceremonies were accom- 
an iran. Plut. Lyc. 17 gives the age of an iran as 20. ‘This agrees 
with the age of an pros at Athens as ‘ 15-20’, ‘ 14-21’, ‘ about 16” ; 
see authorities in Stephanus s. v. ép7Bos. Such variations in the date 
of ‘ puberty ceremonies’ are common. 

1 See Rise of the Greek Epic, Appendix on Hym. Dem.; and 
W. R. Halliday, C. R. xxv, 8. Nilsson’s valuable article has appeared 


since the ENG was written (see note 3, p. 46). 


I SATURNIA REGNA 49 


panied by a casting off of the old year, the old garments, 
and everything that is polluted by the infection of 
‘death. And not only of death ; but clearly I think, in 
spite of the protests of some Hellenists, of guilt or sin 
also. For the life of the Year-Daemon, as it seems to be 
reflected in Tragedy, is generally a story of Pride and 
Punishment. Each Year arrives, waxes great, commits 
the sin of Hubris, and then is slain. The death is 
deserved ; but the slaying is a sin: hence comes the 
next Year as Avenger, or as the Wronged One re-risen. 
‘All things pay retribution for their injustice one to 
another according to the ordinance of time.’! It is 
this range of ideas, half suppressed during the classical 
period, but evidently still current among the ruder 
and less Hellenized peoples, which supplied St. Paul 
with some of his most famous and deep-reaching | 
metaphors. ‘ Thou fool, that which thou sowest is not 
quickened except it die.?* ‘ As He was raised from the 
dead we may walk with Him in newness of life.? And 
this renovation must be preceded by a casting out and 
killing of the old polluted life—‘ the old man in us must 
first be crucified ’. 
‘’The old man must be crucified.” We observed 

that in all the three Festivals there was a pervasive 
element of vague fear. Hitherto we have been dealing 


1 Anaximander apud Simplic. phys. 24, 13; Diels, Fragmente der 
V orsokratiker, i. 13. See especially F. M. Cornford, From Religion 
to Philosophy (Cambridge, 1912), 1; also my article on English and 
Greek Tragedy in Essays of the Oxford English School, 1912. ‘This 
explanation of the tpiros owrnp is my conjecture. 

2 1 Cor. xv. 36; Rom. vi generally, 3-11. 

2960 G 


50 SATURNIA REGNA 1 


with early Greek religion chiefly from the point of view 
of mana, the positive power or force that man tries to 
acquire from his totem-animal or his god. But there 
is also a negative side to be considered: there is not 
only the mana, but the tabu, the Forbidden, the Thing 
Feared. We must cast away the old year; we must 
put our sins on to a happakés or scapegoat and drive it 
out. When the ghosts have returned and feasted with 
us at the Anthesteria we must, with tar and branches of 
buckthorn, purge them out of every corner of the rooms 
till the air is pure from the infection of death. We must 
avoid speaking dangerous words; in great moments 
we must avoid speaking any words at all, lest there 
should be even in the most innocent of them some 
unknown danger; for we are surrounded above and 
below by Kéres, or Spirits, winged influences, shape- 
less or of unknown shape, sometimes the spirits of death, 
sometimes of disease, madness, calamity; thousands 
and thousands of them, as Sarpedon says, from whom 
man can never escape nor hide;* ‘all the air so 
crowded with them’, says an unknown ancient poet, 
‘that there is not one empty chink into which you 
could push the spike of a blade of corn.’ ? 

The extraordinary security of our modern life in 
times of peace makes it hard for us to realize, except 
by a definite effort of the imagination, the constant 
precariousness, the frightful proximity of death, that 


1 Il. M. 326. prupia, ds od« éore puyeiv Bporov ovd tradvéar. 
2 Frg. Ap. Plut. Consol. ad Apoll, xxvi... dru“ wAein pev yaia KaKov 


2 


mein 5€ Otdacca.” Kat “roidde Ovytoicr KaKa KaKOv api Te KnpeEs 


eiActvrat, Keven 8 eiadvorts ovd’ abép.” (MS. aifépi). 


I SATURNIA REGNA SI 


was usual in these weak ancient communities. They 
were in fear of wild beasts; they were helpless 
against floods, helpless against pestilences. Their food 
depended on the crops of one tiny plot of ground ; and 
if the Saviour was not reborn with the spring, they 
slowly and miserably died. And all the while they 
knew almost nothing of the real causes that made 
crops succeed or fail. They only felt sure it was 
somehow a matter of pollution, of unexpiated defile- 
ment. It is this state of things that explains the curious 
cruelty of early agricultural doings, the human sacrifices, 
the scapegoats, the tearing in pieces of living animals, 
and perhaps of living men, the steeping of the fields in 
blood. Like most cruelty it has its roots in terror, terror 
of the breach of Yabu—the Forbidden Thing. I will 
not dwell on this side of the picture: it is well enough 
known. But we have to remember that, like so many 
morbid growths of the human mind, it has its sublime 
side. We must not forget that the human victims 
were often volunteers. The records of Carthage and 
Jerusalem, the long list in Greek legend of princes and 
princesses who died for their country, tell the same 
story. In most human societies, savage as well as 
civilized, it is not hard to find men who are ready to 
endure death for their fellow-citizens. We need not 
suppose that the martyrs were always the noblest of the 
human race. They were sometimes mad—hysterical 
or megalomaniac: sometimes reckless and desperate : 
sometimes, as in the curious case attested of the Roman 
armies on the Danube, they were men of strong desires 
and weak imagination ready to die at the end of a short 


52 SATURNIA REGNA 


period, if in the meantime they might glut all their 
senses with unlimited indulgence.’ 

Still, when all is said, there is nothing that stirs 
men’s imagination like the contemplation of martyr- 
dom, and it is no wonder that the more emotional cults 
of antiquity vibrate with the worship of this dying 
Saviour, the Sdsipolis, the Sdétér, who in so many 
forms dies with his world or for his world, and rises 
again as the world rises, triumphant through suffering 
over Death and the broken Tabu. 

Tabu is at first sight a far more prominent element 
in the primitive religions than Mana, just as misfortune 
and crime are more highly coloured and striking than 
prosperity and decent behaviour. ‘To an early Greek 
tribe the world of possible action was sharply divided 
between what was Themis and what was Not Themis, 
between lawful and tabu, holy and unholy, correct 
and forbidden. ‘To do a thing that was not Themis 
was a sure source of public disaster. Consequently 
it was of the first necessity in a life full of such perils 
to find out the exact rules about them. How is that 
to be managed ? ‘Themis is ancient law: it is ta warpia, 
the way of our ancestors, the thing that has always 
been done and is therefore divinely right. In ordinary 
life, of course, Themis is clear. Every one knows it. 


' Frazer, Lectures on the Early History of the Kingship, 267; 
F. Cumont, ‘ Les Actes de S, Dasius’, in Analecta Bollandiana, xvi. 
5-16; cf. especially what St. Augustine says about the disreputable 
hordes of would-be martyrs called Circumcelliones. See Index to 
Augustine, vol. xiin Migne: some passages collected in Seeck, Gesch. 
d, Untergangs der antiken Welt, vol. iii, Anhang, pp. 503 ff. 


1 SATURNIA REGNA 33 


But from time to time new emergencies arise, the like 
of which we have never seen, and they frighten us. We 
must go to the Gerontes, the Old Men of the Tribe ; 
they will perhaps remember what our fathers did. 
What they tell us will be Presbiston, a word which 
means indifferently ‘oldest’ and ‘ best’—aiet dé vedirepor 
adpadéovaiv, ‘Young men are always being foolish’. 
Of course, if there is a Basileus, a holy King, he by 
his special power may perhaps know best of all, though 
he too must take care not to gainsay the Old Men. 
For the whole problem is to find out ra wdrpia, the 
ways that our fathers followed. And suppose the Old 
Men themselves fail us, what must we needs do? Here 
we come to a famous and peculiar Greek custom, for 
which I have never seen quoted any exact parallel or 
any satisfactory explanation. If the Old Men fail us, 
we must go to those older still, go to our great ancestors, 
the npwes, the Chthonian people, lying in their sacred 
tombs, and ask them to help. The word ypav means 
both ‘to lend money’ and ‘ to give an oracle’, two 
ways of helping people in an emergency. Sometimes 
a tribe might happen to have a real ancestor buried 
in the neighbourhood ; if so, his tomb would be an 
oracle. More often perhaps, for the memories of 
savage tribes are very precarious, there would be no 
well-recorded personal tomb. The oracle would be at 
some place sacred to the Chthonian people in general, 
or to some particular personification of them, a Delphi 
or a cave of Trophdénius, a place of Snakes and Earth. 
You go to the Chthonian folk for guidance because they 
are themselves the Oldest of the Old Ones, and they 


54 SATURNIA REGNA 


know the real custom: they know what is Presbiston, 
what is Themis. And by an easy extension of this 
knowledge they are also supposed to know what 1s. 
He who knows the law fully to the uttermost also 
knows what will happen if the law is broken. It is, 
I think, important to realize that the normal reason 
for consulting an oracle was not to ask questions of 
fact. It was that some emergency had arisen in which 
men simply wanted to know how they ought to behave. 
The advice they received in this way varied from 
the virtuous to the abominable, as the religion itself 
varied. A great mass of oracles can be quoted enjoining 
the rules of customary morality, justice, honesty, piety, 
duty to a man’s parents, to the old, and to the weak. 
But of necessity the oracles hated change and strangled 
the progress of knowledge. Also, like most manifesta- 
tions of early religion, they throve upon human terror : 
the more blind the terror the stronger became their 
hold. In such an atmosphere the lowest and most 
beastlike elements of humanity tended to come to 
the front ; and religion no doubt as a rule joined with 
them in drowning the voice of criticism and of civiliza- 
tion, that 1s, of reason and of mercy. When really 
frightened the oracle generally fell back on some remedy 
full of pain and blood. The medieval plan of burning 
heretics alive had not yet been invented. But the 
history of uncivilized man, if it were written, would 
provide a vast list of victims, all of them innocent, who 
died or suffered to expiate some portent or monstrum— 
some reported répas—with which they had nothing 
whatever to do, which was in no way altered by their 


I SATURNIA REGNA 55 


suffering, which probably never really happened at 
all, and if it did was of no consequence. The sins of 
the modern world in dealing with heretics and witches 
have perhaps been more gigantic than those of primitive 
men, but one can hardly rise from the record of these 
ancient observances without being haunted by the 
judgement of the Roman poet : 


Tantum religio potuit suadere malorum, 


and feeling with him that the lightening of this cloud, 
the taming of this blind dragon, must rank among 
the very greatest services that Hellenism wrought for 
mankind. 


4 





eh iM i 
ia Malad 


II 
THE OLYMPIAN CONQUEST 


a 
2960 H 


WAL 
my Dy ¥ 
WK 





IT 


THE OLYMPIAN CONQUEST 
I. Origin of the Olympians 


Tue historian of early Greece must find himself 
often on the watch for a particular cardinal moment, 
generally impossible to date in time and sometimes 
hard even to define in terms of development, when 
the clear outline that we call Classical Greece begins 
to take shape out of the mist. It is the moment when, 
as Herodotus puts it, ‘the Hellenic race was marked 
off from the barbarian, as more intelligent and more 
emancipated from silly nonsense’.’ In the eighth 
century B. C., for instance, so far as our remains indicate, 
there cannot have been much to show that the inhabi- 
tants of Attica and Boeotia and the Peloponnese were 
markedly superior to those of, say, Lycia or Phrygia, or 
even Epirus. By the middle of the fifth century the 
difference is enormous. On the one side is Hellas, on 
the other the motley tribes of ‘ barbaroi ’. 

When the change does come and 1s consciously felt 

1 Hdt. i. 60 eed ye dzexpiOn ex adattépov Tov BapBapov eOveos 76 
“EAAnvixov éov Kat de€twrepov Kal eiyGins nABiov drynAAaypévov 
padXrov. As tothe date here suggested for the definite dawn of 
Hellenism Mr. Edwyn Bevan writes to me: ‘I have often wondered 
what the reason is that about that time a new age began all over the 
world that we know. In Nearer Asia the old Semitic monarchies gave 


place to the Zoroastrian Aryans; in India it was the time of Buddha, 
in China of Confucius.’ Ety6in 7AiOos is almost ‘ Urdummbert’. 


60 THE OLYMPIAN CONQUEST Il 


we may notice a significant fact about it. It does 
/not announce itself as what it was, a new thing in 
the world. It professes to be a revival, or rather 
an emphatic realization, of something very old. ‘The 
new spirit of classical Greece, with all its humanity, its 
intellectual life, its genius for poetry and art, describes 
itself merely as being ‘ Hellenic "—like the Hellenes. 
And the Hellenes were simply, as far as we can make 
out, much the same as the Achaioi, one of the many 
tribes of predatory Northmen who had swept down on 
the Aegean kingdoms in the dawn of Greek history.? 
This claim of a new thing to be old is, in varying 
degrees, a common characteristic of great movements. 
The Reformation professed to be a return to the Bible, 
the Evangelical movement in England a return to the 
Gospels, the High Church movement a return to the 
early Church. A large element even in the French 
Revolution, the greatest of all breaches with the past, 
had for its ideal a return to Roman republican virtue 
or to the simplicity of the natural man.? I noticed 
quite lately a speech of an American Progressive leader 
claiming that his principles were simply those of 
Abraham Lincoln. ‘The tendency is due in part to the 
almost insuperable difficulty of really inventing a new 


1 See in general Ridgeway, Early Age of Greece, vol. i; Leaf, 
Companion to Homer, Introduction; R. G. E., chap. ii; Chadwick, 
The Heroic Age (last four chapters); and J. L. Myres, Dawn of 
History, chaps. viii and 1x. 

2 Since writing the above I findin Vandal, L’ Avénement de Bonaparte, 
p. 20, in Nelson’s edition, a phrase about the Revolutionary soldiers ; 
* Tls se modelaient sur ces Romains . . . sur ces Spartiates . . . et ils cré- 
aient un type de haute vertu guerriére, quand ils croyaient seulement 
le reproduire.’ 


II THE OLYMPIAN CONQUEST 61 


word to denote a new thing. It is so much easier to 
take an existing word, especially a famous word with 
fine associations, and twist it into a new sense. In 
part, no doubt, it comes from mankind’s natural love 
for these old associations, and the fact that nearly all 
people who are worth much have in them some instinc- 
tive spirit of reverence. Even when striking out a new 
path they like to feel that they are following at least the 
spirit of one greater than themselves. 

The Hellenism of the sixth and fifth centuries was 
to a great extent what the Hellenism of later ages was 
almost entirely, an ideal and a standard of culture. 
The classical Greeks were not, strictly: speaking, pure 
Hellenes by blood... Herodotus and Thucydides? are 
quite clear about that. The original Hellenes were 
a particular conquering tribe of great prestige, which 
attracted the surrounding tribes to follow it, imitate 
it, and call themselves by itsname. The Spartans were, 
to Herodotus, Hellenic; the Athenians on the other 
hand were not. They were Pelasgian, but by a certain 
time ‘ changed into Hellenes and learnt the language ’. 
In historical times we cannot really find any tribe of 
pure Hellenes in existence, though the name clings 
faintly to a particular district, not otherwise important, 
‘in South Thessaly. Had there been any undoubted 
Hellenes with incontrovertible pedigrees still going, 
very likely the ideal would have taken quite a different 
name. But where no one’s ancestry would bear much 
inspection, the only way to show you were a true 
Hellene was to behave as such: that is, to approximate 


1 Hdt.i. 56f.; Th.i. 3 (Hellen son of Deucalion, in both). 


62 THE OLYMPIAN CONQUEST Il 


to some constantly rising ideal of what the true Hellene 
should be. In all probability if a Greek of the fifth 
century, like Aeschylus or even Pindar, had met a group 
of the real Hellenes or Achaioi of the Migrations, he 
would have set them down as so many obvious and 
flaming barbarians. 

We do not know whether the old Hellenes had any 
general word to denote the surrounding peoples (‘ Pelas- 
gians and divers other barbarous tribes ?+) whom they 
conquered or accepted as allies.? In any case by the 
time of the Persian Wars (say 500 B.c.) all these tribes 
together considered themselves Hellenized, bore the 
name of ‘ Hellenes ’, and formed a kind of unity against 
hordes of ‘ barbaroi’ surrounding them on every side 
and threatening them especially from the east. 

Let us consider for a moment the dates. In political 
history this self-realization of the Greek tribes as 
Hellenes against barbarians seems to have been first 
felt in the Ionian settlements on the coast of Asia 
Minor, where the ‘sons of Javan’? (Yawan ="Idov) 
clashed as invaders against the native Hittite and 
Semite. It was emphasized by a similar clash in the 
further colonies in Pontus and in the West. If we 
wish for a central moment as representing this self- 
realization of Greece, I should be inclined to find it 

1 Hdt.i. 58. In viii. 44 the account is more detailed. 

“The Homeric evidence is, as usual, inconclusive. ‘The word 
BapBapo. is absent from both poems, an absence which must be 
intentional on the part of the later reciters, but may well come 
from the original sources. The compound BapBapddwvor occurs in 


B 867, but who knows the date of that particular line in that particular 
wording ? 


II THE OLYMPIAN CONQUEST 63 


in the reign of Pisistratus (560-527 B.c.) when that 
monarch made, as it were, the first sketch of an 
Athenian empire based on alliances and took over to 
Athens the leadership of the Jonian race. 

In literature the decisive moment is clear. It came 
when, in Mr. Mackail’s phrase, ‘Homer came to 
Hellas’.t The date is apparently the same, and the 
influences at work are the same. It seems to have 
been under Pisistratus that the Homeric Poems, in 
some form or other, came from Ionia to be recited in 
a fixed order at the Panathenaic Festival, and to find 
a canonical form and a central home in Athens till the 
end of the classical period. Athens is the centre from 
which Homeric influence radiates over the mainland 
of Greece. Its effect upon literature was of course 
enormous. It can be traced in various ways. By the 
content of the literature, which now begins to be 
filled with the heroic saga. By a change of style which 
emerges in, say, Pindar and Aeschylus when compared 
with what we know of Corinna or Thespis. More 
objectively and definitely it can be traced in a remark- 
able change of dialect. The old Attic poets, like Solon, 
were comparatively little affected by the epic influence ; 
the later elegists, like Jon, Euenus, and Plato, were 
steeped in it.” 

1 Paper read to the Classical Association at Birmingham in 1908. 

2 For Korinna see Wilamowitz in Berliner Klasstkertexte, V. xiv, 
especially p. 55. ‘The Homeric epos drove out poetry like Corinna’s. 
She had actually written: ‘I sing the great deeds of heroes and 
heroines’ (‘over 8’ eipwwv dperas xeipwiddwv aidw, fr. 10, Bergk), so 
that presumably her style was sufficiently ‘ heroic’ for an un-Homeric 
generation. For the change of dialect in elegy, &c., see Thumb 


Se 


64 THE OLYMPIAN CONQUEST: il 


In religion the cardinal moment is the same. It 
consists in the coming of Homer’s ‘ Olympian Gods ’, 
and that is to be the subject of the present essay. 
I am not, of course, going to describe the cults and 
characters of the various Olympians. For that inquiry 
the reader will naturally go to the five learned volumes 
of my colleague, Dr. Farnell. I wish merely to face 
certain difficult and, I think, hitherto unsolved pro- 
blems affecting the meaning and origin and history of 
the Olympians as a whole. 

Herodotus in a famous passage tells us that Homer 
and Hesiod ‘ made the generations of the Gods for 
the Greeks and gave them their names and dis- 
tinguished their offices and crafts and portrayed their 
shapes ’ (2. §3). he date of this wholesale proceeding 
was, he thinks, perhaps as much as four hundred 
years before his own day (c. 430 B. cc.) but not more. 
Before that time the Pelasgians—i.e. the primitive 
inhabitants of Greece as opposed to the Hellenes— 
were worshipping gods in indefinite numbers, with no 
particular names; many of them appear as figures 
carved emblematically with sex-emblems to represent 
the powers of fertility and generation, like the Athenian 
‘Herms’. The whole account bristles with points for 
discussion, but in general it suits very well with the 
picture drawn in the first of these essays, with its 
Earth Maidens and Mothers and its projected Kouroi. 


Handbuch d. gr. Dialekte, pp. 327-30, 368 ff., and the literature there 
cited. Fick and Hoffmann overstated the change, but Hoffmann’s 
new statement in Die griechische Sprache, 1911, sections on Die Elegie, 
seems just. The question of Tyrtaeus is complicated by other problems. 


I THE OLYMPIAN CONQUEST 65 
The background is the pre-Hellenic ‘Urdummheit’ ; 


the new shape impressed upon it is the great anthropo- 
morphic Olympian family, as defined in the Homeric 
epos and, more timidly, in Hesiod. But of Hesiod 
we must speak later. | 


Now who are these Olympian Gods and where do 
they come from ? Homer did not ‘ make’ them out 
of nothing. But the understanding of them is beset 
with problems. 

In the first place why are they called ‘ OR eaee ue 
Are they the Gods of Mount Olympus, the old sacred 
mountain of Homer’s Achaioi, or do they belong to 
the great sanctuary of Olympia in which Zeus, the lord 
of the Olympians, had his greatest festival? The two 
are at opposite ends of Greece, Olympus in North 
Thessaly in the north-east, Olympia in Elis in the 
south-west. From which do the Olympians come? 
On the one hand it is clear in Homer that they dwell 
on Mount Olympus; they have ‘ Olympian houses ’ 
beyond human sight, on the top of the sacred moun- 
tain, which in the Odyssey is identified with heaven. 
On the other hand, when Pisistratus introduced the 
worship of Olympian Zeus on a great scale into Athens 
and built the Olympieum, he seems to have brought 
him straight from Olympia in Elis. For he introduced 
the special Elean complex of gods, Zeus, Rhea, Kronos, 
and Gé Olympia.’ 

Fortunately this puzzle can be solved. The Olym- 

1 The facts are well known: see Paus. 1.18.7. The inference was 


pointed out to me by Miss Harrison. 
2960 I 


66 THE OLYMPIAN CONQUEST I 


' pians belong to both places. It is merely a case of 
“tribal migration. History, confirmed by the study of 
the Greek dialects, seems to show that these northern 
Achaioi came down across central Greece and the Gulf 
of Corinth and settled in Elis? They brought with 
them their Zeus, who was already called ‘ Olympian’, 
and established him as superior to the existing god, 
Kronos. ‘The Games became Olympian and the 
sanctuary by which they were performed ‘ Olympia ’.? 

As soon as this point is clear, we understand also why 
there is more than one Mount Olympus. We can all 
think of two, one in Thessaly and one across the Aegean 
_in Mysia. But there are many more; some twenty- 
odd, if I mistake not, in the whole Greek region. 
It is a pre-Greek word applied to mountains; and 
it seems clear that the ‘Olympian’ gods, wherever their 
worshippers moved, tended to dwell in the highest 
mountain in the neighbourhood, and the mountain 
thereby became Olympus. 

The name, then, explains itself. The Olympians 
are the mountain gods of the old invading Northmen, 
the chieftains and princes, each with his comitatus or 
loose following of retainers and minor chieftains, who 


* I do not here raise the question how far the Achaioi have special 
affinities with the north-west group of tribes or dialects. See Thumb, 
Handbuch d. gr. Dialekte (1909), p. 166. The Achaioi must have 
passed through South Thessaly in any case. 

2 That Kronos was in possession of the Kronion and Olympia 
generally before Zeus came was recognized in antiquity ; Paus, v. 7. 4 
and 10. Also Mayer in Roscher’s Lexicon, ii, p. 1508, 50 ff.; Rise of 
Greek Epic,? pp. 40-8; J. A. K. Thomson, Studies in the Odyssey 
(1914), chap. vil, viii; Chadwick, Heroic Age (1911), pp. 282, 289. 


a 


—— 


II THE OLYMPIAN CONQUEST 67 


broke in upon the ordered splendours of the Aegean 
palaces and, still more important, on the ordered sim- 
plicity of tribal life in the pre-Hellenic villages of the — 
mainland. Now, it is a canon of religious study that 
all gods reflect the social state, past or present, of 
their worshippers. From this point of view what 
appearance do the Olympians of Homer make? What 
are they there for? What do they do, and what are 
their relations one to another? 

The gods of most nations claim to have created the 
world. The Olympians make no such claim. ‘The 
most they ever did was to conquer it. Zeus and his — 
comitatus conquered Cronos and his; conquered and 
expelled them—sent them migrating beyond the 
horizon, Heaven knows where. Zeus took the chief 
dominion and remained a permanent overlord, but he 
apportioned large kingdoms to his brothers Hades and 
Poseidon, and confirmed various of his children and 
followers in lesser fiefs. Apollo went off on his own 
adventure and conquered Delphi. Athena conquered 
the Giants. She gained Athens by a conquest over 
Poseidon, a point of which we will speak later. 

And when they have conquered their kingdoms, what 
do they do? Do they attend to the government? Do 
they promote agriculture? Do they practise trades and 
industries? Nota bit of it. Why should they do any 
honest work? ‘They find it easier to live on the revenues 
and blast with thunderbolts the people who do not 
pay. They are conquering chieftains, royal buccaneers. 
They fight, and feast, and play, and make music ; they 
drink deep, and roar with laughter at the lame smith 


68 THE OLYMPIAN CONQUEST II 


whowaitsonthem. Theyarenever afraid, except of their 
own king. They never tell lies, except in love and war. 

A few deductions may be made from this statement, 
but they do not affect its main significance. One god, 
you may say, Hephaistos, is definitely a craftsman. 
Yes: asmith, a maker of weapons. The one craftsman 
that a gang of warriors needed to have by them; and 
they preferred him-lame, so that he should not run 
away. Again, Apollo herded for hire the cattle of 
Admetus ; Apollo and Poseidon built the walls of ‘Troy 
for Laomedon. Certainly in such stories we have 
an intrusion of other elements; but in any case the 
work done is not habitual work, it is a special punish- 
ment. Again, it is not denied that the Olympians 
have some effect on agriculture and on justice: they 
destroy the harvests of those who offend them, they 
punish oath-breakers and the like. Even in the Heroic 
Age itself—if we may adopt Mr. Chadwick’s convenient 
title for the Age of the Migrations—chieftains and 
gods probably retained some vestiges of the functions 
they had exercised in more normal and settled times ; 
and besides we must always realize that, in these 
inquiries, we never meet a simple and uniform figure. 


We must further remember that these gods are not real © 


people with a real character. ‘They never existed. 
They are only concepts, exceedingly confused cloudy 
and changing concepts, in the minds of thousands of 
diverse worshippers and non-worshippers. ‘They 
change every time they are thought of, as a word 
changes every time it is pronounced. Even in the 
height of the Achaean wars the concept of any one 


r 





II THE OLYMPIAN CONQUEST 69 


god would be mixed up with traditions and associa- 
tions drawn from the surrounding populations and 
their gods ; and by the time they come down to us in 
Homer and our other early literature, they have passed 
through the minds of many different ages and places, 
especially Tonia and Athens. 

The Olympians as described in our text of Homer, 
or as described in the Athenian recitations of the sixth 
century, are mutatis mutandis related to the Olympians 
of the Heroic Age much as the Hellenes of the sixth 
century are to the Hellenes of the Heroic Age. I say 
‘ mutatis mutandts ’, because the historical development 
of a group of imaginary concepts shrined in tradition 
and romance can never be quite the same as that of the 
people who conceive them. The realm of fiction is 
apt both to leap in front and to lag in the rear of the 
march of real life. Romance will hug picturesque 
darknesses as well as invent perfections. But the gods 
of Homer, as we have them, certainly seem to show 
traces of the process through which they have passed : 
of an origin among the old conquering Achaioi, a 
development in the Ionian epic schools, and a final 
home in Athens. 


1 I do not touch here on the subject of the gradual expurgation of 
the Poems to suit the feelings of a more civilized audience ; see Rise of 
the Greek Epic,? pp. 120-4. Many scholars believe that the Poems 
did not exist as a written book till the public copy was made by 
Pisistratus ; see Cauer, Grundfragen der Homerkritik * (1909), pp. 113- 
45; R. G. E.,3 pp. 304-16; Leaf, Lliad, vol. i, p. xvi. This view is 
tempting, though the evidence seems to be insufficient to justify 
a pronouncement either way. If it is true, then various passages 
which show a verbal use of earlier documents (like the Bellerophon 


70 THE OLYMPIAN CONQUEST I 


For example, what gods are chiefly prominent in 
Homer? In the Jiad certainly three, Zeus, Apollo, 
and Athena, and much the same would hold for 
the Odyssey. Next to them in importance will be 
Poseidon, Hera, and Hermes. 

Zeus stands somewhat apart. He is one of the very 
few gods with recognizable and undoubted Indo- 
germanic names, Djéus, the well-attested sky- and 
rain-god of the Aryan race. He is Achaian; he is 
* Hellanios ’, the god worshipped by all Hellenes. He is 
also, curiously enough, Pelasgian, and Mr. A. B. Cook * 
can explain to us the seeming contradiction. But the 
Northern elements in the conception of Zeus have on 
the whole triumphed over any Pelasgian or Aegean 
sky-god with which they may have mingled, and Zeus, 
in spite of his dark hair, may be mainly treated as the 
patriarchal god of the invading Northmen, passing 
from the Upper Danube down by his three great 
sanctuaries, Dodona, Olympus, and Olympia. He had 
an extraordinary power of ousting or absorbing the 
various objects of aboriginal worship which he found 
in his path. The story of Meilichios above (p. 28) is 
a common one. Of course, we must not suppose that 
the Zeus of the actual Achaioi was a figure quite like 
the Zeus of Pheidias or of Homer. There has been 


a good deal of expurgation in the Homeric Zeus,’ as 


passage, R. G. E.,3 pp. 175 ff.) cannot have been put in before the 
Athenian period. 

‘In his Zeus, the Indo-European Sky-God (1914, 1924). See 
Re Ges inp .40 ft. 

# A somewhat similar change occurred in Othin, though he always 
retains more of the crooked wizard. 





I THE OLYMPIAN CONQUEST 71 
Mr. Cook clearly shows. The Counsellor and Cloud- 


compeller of classical Athens was the wizard and rain- 
maker of earlier times; and the All-Father surprises 
us in Thera and Crete by appearing both as a babe and 
as a Kouros in spring dances and initiation rituals.’ 
It 1s a long way from these conceptions to the Zeus 
of Aeschylus, a figure as sublime as the Jehovah of Job ; 
but the lineage seems clear. 

Zeus is the Achaean Sky-god. His son Phoebus 
Apollo is of more complex make. On one side he 
is clearly a Northman. He has connexions with the 
Hyperboreans.”, He has a ‘sacred road’ leading far 
into the North, along which offerings are sent back 
from shrine to shrine beyond the bounds of Greek 
knowledge. Such ‘sacred roads’ are normally the 
roads by which the God himself has travelled; the 
offerings are sent back from the new sanctuary to 
the old. On the other side Apollo reaches back to an 
Aegean matriarchal Kouros. His home is Delos, where 
he has a mother, Leto, but no very visible father. He 
leads the ships of his islanders, sometimes in the form 
of a dolphin. He is no ‘ Hellene’. In the fighting 
at Troy he is against the Achaioi: he destroys the 
Greek host, he champions Hector, he even slays 
Achilles. In the Homeric hymn to Apollo we read 
that when the great archer draws near to Olympus 
all the gods tremble and start from their seats; Leto 
alone, and of course Zeus, hold their ground.* What 


1 Themis, chap.i. On the Zeus of Aeschylus cf. R. G. E.,3 pp. 277 ff. ; 
Gomperz, Greek Thinkers, ii. 6-8. 

2 Farnell, Cults, iv. 100-4. See, however, Gruppe, p. 107 f. 

3 Hymn. Ap. init. Cf. Wilamowitz’s Oxford Lecture on ‘ Apollo ’ 
(Oxford, 1907). 


72 THE OLYMPIAN CONQUEST 1 


this god’s original name was at Delos we cannot be 
sure: he has very many names and ‘epithets’. But 
he early became identified with a similar god at 
Delphi and adopted his name, ‘ Apollén’, or, in the 
Delphic and Dorian form, ‘ Apell6n ’—presumably the 
Kouros projected from the Dorian gatherings called 
‘apellae’.' As Phoibos he is a sun-god, and from 
classical times onward we often find him definitely 
identified with the Stn, a distinction which came 
easily to a Kouros. 

In any case, and this is the important point, he 1s at 
Delos the chief god of the Ionians. The Ionians are 
defined by Herodotus as those tribes and cities who 
were sprung from Athens and kept the Apaturia. 
They recognized Delos as their holy place and wor- 
shipped Apollo Patréos as their ancestor.” The Ionian 
Homer has naturally brought us the Ionian god ; and, 
significantly enough, though the tradition makes him 
an enemy of the Greeks, and the poets have to accept 
the tradition, there is no tendency to crab or belittle 
him. He is the most splendid and awful of Homer’s 


Olympians. 


The case of Pallas Athena is even simpler, though it 


leads to a somewhat surprising result. What Apollo 
is to Ionia that, and more, Athena is to Athens. There 
are doubtless foreign elements in Athena, some Cretan 


1 Themis, p. 439f. Cf. 6 ’Ayopatos. Other explanations of the 
name in Gruppe, p. 1224 f., notes. 

2 Hdt. i. 147; Plato, Euthyd. 302c: Socrates. ‘No Ionian 
recognizes a Zeus Patrdos; Apollo is our Patréos, because he was 
father of Ion.’ 








a ee Pe ied oe ae 


11 THE OLYMPIAN CONQUEST 73 


and Jonian, some Northern.? But her whole appearance 
in history and literature tells the same story as her 
name. Athens is her city and she is the goddess of 
Athens, the Athena or Athenaia Koré. In Athens she 
can be simply ‘ Parthenos’, the Maiden; elsewhere 
she is the ‘Attic’ or ‘Athenian Maiden’. As 
Glaucopis she is identified or ‘associated with the 
Owl that was the sacred bird of Athens. As Pallas she 
seems to be a Thunder-maiden, a sort of Keraunia or 
bride of Keraunos. <A Palladion consists of two 
thunder-shields, set one above the other like a figure 
8, and we can trace in art-types the development of 
this 8 into a human figure. It seems clear that the 
old Achaioi cannot have called their warrior-maiden, | 
daughter of Zeus, by the name Athena or Athenaia. 
The Athenian goddess must have come in from 
Athenian influence, and it is strange to find how deep 
into the heart of the poems that influence must have 
reached. If we try to conjecture whose place it is 
that Athena has taken, it is worth remarking that her 
regular epithet, ‘ daughter of Zeus’, belongs in Sanskrit 
to the Dawn-goddess, Eés.2. The transition might 
be helped by some touches of the Dawn-goddess 
that seem to linger about Athena in myth. The 
rising Sun stayed his horses while Athena was born 
from the head of Zeus. Also she was born amid 
a snow-storm of gold. And Eés, on the other hand, 1s, 


1 See Gruppe, p. 1206, on the development of his ‘ Philistine 
thunderstorm-goddess ’. 

2 Hoffmann, Gesch. d. griechischen Sprache, Leipzig, 1911, p. 16. 
Cf. Pind. Ol. vii. 35 ; Ov. Metam. ix. 421; xv. 191, 700, &c. 

2960 K 


74 THE OLYMPIAN CONQUEST 1 


like Athena, sometimes the daughter of the Giant 
Pallas.' 

Our three chief Olympians, then, explain themselves 
very easily. A body of poetry and tradition, in its 
origin dating from the Achaioi of the Migrations, 
growing for centuries in the hands of Ionian bards, 
and reaching its culminating form at Athens, has 
prominent in it the Achaian Zeus, the Ionian Apollo, 
the Athenian Koré—the same Koré who descended 


1 As to the name, "A@nvata is of course simply ‘Athenian’; the 
shorter and apparently original form ’A@dva,’A6yv7 is not so clear, but it 
seems most likely to mean ‘ Attic’. Cf. Meister, Gr. Dial. ii.290. He 
classes under the head of Oertliche Bestimmungen: a Oeds a4 Iladia 
(Collitz and Bechtel, Sammlung der griechischen Dialekt-Inschriften, 
2, 3, 14%, ©, 15, 16). ‘In Paphos selbst hiess die Géttin nur ad Oeds 
oder & Fdvacca;—a bids & TodAyia (61)—a Obs & "AOdva & rep 
"Hdddtov (60, 27, 28), ‘die Géttin, die Athenische, die tiber Edalion 
(waltet)’; ‘’A6-dva ist, wie J. Baunack (Studia Nicolattana, s. 27) 
gezeigt hat, das Adjectiv zu (*’Ago-is ‘ Seeland ’) :’Arr-is; *Ar6-is ; 
*°A6-is; also ’AO-dva = “Arr-uxyn, ’AO-jvar urspriinglich ’A@-nvar 
x@pat.” Other derivations in Gruppe, p. 1194. Or again ai "AOjvac 
may be simply ‘the place where the Athenas are ’, like of iy@ves, the 
fish-market ; ‘the Athenas’ would be statues, like ot ‘Eppat—the 
famous ‘ Attic Maidens’ on the Acropolis. This explanation would 
lead to some interesting results. 

We need not here consider how, partly by identification with other 
Korae, like Pallas, Onka, &c., partly by a genuine spread of the cult, 
Athena became prominent in other cities. As to Homer, Athena is far 
more deeply imbedded in the Odyssey than in the Jiiad. I am inclined 
to agree with those who believe that our Odyssey was very largely 
composed in Athens, so that in most of the poem Athena is original. 
(Cf. O. Seeck, Die Quellen der Odyssee (1887), pp. 366-420; Miilder, 
Die Ilias und thre Quellen (1910), pp. 350-5.) In some parts of the 
Iliad the name Athena may well have been substituted for some 
Northern goddess whose name is now lost. 





it THE OLYMPIAN CONQUEST ~: 


in person to restore the exiled Pisistratus to his 
throne. 

We need only throw a glance in passing at a few 
of the other Olympians. Why, for instance, should 
Poseidon be so prominent? In origin he is a puzzling 
figure. Besides the Achaean Earth-shaking brother 
of Zeus in Thessaly there seems to be some Pelasgian 
or Aegean god present in him. He is closely connected 
with Libya ; he brings the horse from there.? At times 
he exists in order to be defeated ; defeated in Athens 
by Athena, in Naxos by Dionysus, in Aegina by Zeus, 
in Argos by Hera, in Acrocorinth by Helios though 
he continues to hold the Isthmus. In Trozen he 
shares a temple on more or less equal terms with 
Athena.? Even in Troy he is defeated and cast out 
from the walls his own hands had built. ‘These 
problems we need not for the present face. By the 
time that concerns us most the Earth-Shaker is a sea- 
god, specially important to the sea-peoples of Athens 


1 Tt is worth noting also that this Homeric triad seems also to be 
recognized as the chief Athenian triad. Plato, Euthyd. 302 c, quoted 
above, continues: Socrates. ‘We have Zeus with the names Herkeios 
and Phratrios, but not Patrdos, and Athena Phratria.? Dionysodorus. 
‘Well, that is enough. You have, apparently, Apollo and Zeus and 
Athena?’ Socrates. ‘ Certainly.’—Apollo is put first because he has 
been accepted as Patréos. But see R. G. E.,? p. 49, n. 

2 Ridgeway, Origin and Influence of the Thoroughbred Horse, 1905, 
pp. 287-93; and Early Age of Greece, 1901, p. 223. 

eperebiutaO, Gonv.ix.6 >) Pans, li 1)03°4..0 315. 5 ; 330. 6, 

4 So in the non-Homeric tradition, Eur. Troades init. In the /lzad 
he is made an enemy of ‘Troy, like Athena, who is none the less the 


Guardian of the city. 


76 THE OLYMPIAN CONQUEST II 


and Jonia. He is the father of Neleus, the ancestor 
of the Ionian kings. His temple at Cape Mykale is the 
scene of the Panionia, and second only to Delos as 
a religious centre of the Jonian tribes. He has intimate 
relations with Attica too. Besides the ancient contest 
with Athena for the possession of the land, he appears 
as the father of ‘Theseus, the chief Athenian hero. He 
is merged in other Attic heroes, like Aigeus and Erech- 
theus. He is the special patron of the Athenian knights. 
Thus his prominence in Homer is very natural. 

What of Hermes? His history deserves a long mono- 
graph to itself; it 1s so exceptionally instructive. 
Originally, outside Homer, Hermes was simply an old 
upright stone, a pillar furnished with the regular 
Pelasgian sex-symbol of procreation. Set up over a 
tomb he is the power that generates new lives, or, in 
the ancient conception, brings the souls back to be 
born again. He is the Guide of the Dead, the Psycho- 
pompos, the divine Herald between the two worlds. 
If you have a message for the dead, you speak it to 
the Herm at the grave. This notion of Hermes as 
herald may have been helped by his use as a boundary- 
stone—the Latin Terminus. Your boundary-stone 1s 
your representative, the deliverer of your message, 
to the hostile neighbour or alien. If you wish to parley 
with him, you advance up to your boundary-stone. 
If you go, as a Herald, peacefully, into his territory, 
you place yourself under the protection of the same 
sacred stone, the last sign that remains of your own 
safe country. If you are killed or wronged, it is he, 
the immovable Watcher, who will avenge you. 





1m THE OLYMPIAN CONQUEST 77 


Now this phallic stone post was quite unsuitable to 
Homer. It was not decent ; it was not quite human ; 
and every personage in Homer has to be both. In 
the [iad Hermes is simply removed, and a beautiful 
creation or tradition, Iris, the rainbow-goddess, takes 
his place as the messenger from heaven to earth. In 
the Odyssey he is admitted, but so changed and 
castigated that no one would recognize the old Herm 
in the beautiful and gracious youth who performs the 
gods’ messages. I can only detect in his language 
one possible trace of his old Pelasgian character.! 

Pausanias knew who worked the transformation. In 
speaking of Hermes among the other ‘ Workers’, who 
were ‘ pillars in square form ’, he says, ‘ As to Hermes, 
the poems of Homer have given currency to the report 
that he is a servant of Zeus and leads down the spirits 
of the departed to Hades’.? In the magic papyri 
Hermes returns to something of his old functions ; 
he is scarcely to be distinguished from the Agathos 
Daimon. But thanks to Homer he is purified of his 
old phallicism. 

Hera, too, the wife of Zeus, seems to have a curious 
past behind her. She has certainly ousted the original 
wife, Dione, whose worship continued unchallenged 
in far Dodona, from times before Zeus descended upon 
Greek lands. When he invaded Thessaly he seems 
to have left Dione behind and wedded the Queen of 
the conquered territory. Hera’s permanent epithet is 
‘ Argeia ’, ‘ Argive’. She is the Argive Koré, or Year- 

1 Od. 6 339 ff. 
2 See Paus. viii. 32. 4. Themis, pp. 295, 296. 


78 THE OLYMPIAN CONQUEST I 
Maiden, as Athena is the Attic, Cypris the Cyprian. 


But Argos in Homer denotes two different places, 
a watered plain in the Peloponnese and a watered plain 
in Thessaly. Hera was certainly the chief goddess of 
Peloponnesian Argos in historic times, and had brought 
her consort Herakles 1 along with her, but at one time 
she seems to have belonged to the Thessalian Argos. 
She helped Thessalian Jason to launch the ship Argo, 
and they launched it from Thessalian Pagasae. In the 
Argonautica she is a beautiful figure, gracious and 
strong, the lovely patroness of the young hero. No 
element of strife is haunting her. But in the liad for 
some reason she is unpopular. She is a shrew, a scold, 
and a jealous wife. Why? Miss Harrison suggests that 
the quarrel with Zeus dates from the time of the 
invasion, when he was the conquering alien and she 
the native queen of the land.?_ It may be, too, that the 
Ionian poets who respected their own Apollo and 
Athena and Poseidon, regarded Hera as representing 
some race or tribe that they disliked. A goddess of 
Dorian Argos might be as disagreeable as a Dorian. It 
seems to be for some reason like this that Aphrodite, 
identified with Cyprus or some centre among Oriental 


1 For the connexion of "Hpa 7pws ‘HpaxAys (Hpvxados in Sophron, 
fr. 142 K) see especially A. B. Cook, Class. Review, 1906, pp. 365 and 
416. ‘The name "Hpa seems probably to be an ‘ ablaut ’ form of dpa: 
cf. phrases like "Hpa rteAefa. Other literature in Gruppe, pp. 452, 
1122. 

* Prolegomena, p. 315, referring to H. D. Miiller, Mythologie d. 
gr. Stamme, pp. 249-55. Another view is suggested by Milder, Die 
Ilias und ihre Quellen, p. 136. The jealous Hera comes from the 
Heracles-saga, in which the wife hated the bastard. 


I THE OLYMPIAN CONQUEST 79 


barbarians, is handled with so much disrespect ; that 
Ares, the Thracian Kouros, a Sun-god and War-god, is 
treated as a mere bully and coward and general pest.} 

There is not much faith in these gods, as they appear 
to us in the Homeric Poems, and not much respect, 
except perhaps for Apollo and Athena and Poseidon. 
The buccaneer kings of the Heroic Age, cut loose from 
all local and tribal pieties, intent only on personal gain 
and glory, were not the people to build up a powerful 
religious faith. They left that, as they left agriculture 
and handiwork, to the nameless common folk.2 And 
it was not likely that the bards of cultivated and 
scientific Ionia should waste much religious emotion 
on a system which was clearly meant more for romance 
than for the guiding of life. 

Yet the power of romance is great. In the memory 
of Greece the kings and gods of the Heroic Age were 
transfigured. What had been really an age of bucca- 
neering violence became in memory an age of chivalry 
and splendid adventure. The traits that were at all 
tolerable were idealized ; those that were intolerable 
were either expurgated, or, if that was impossible, 
were mysticized and explained away. And the savage 
old Olympians became to Athens and the mainland of 
Greece from the sixth century onward emblems of high 
humanity and religious reform. 

1 P, Gardner, in Numismatic Chronicle, N.S. xx, ‘ Ares as a Sun- 


God’. 
2 Chadwick, Heroic Age, especially pp. 414, 459-63. 


80 THE OLYMPIAN CONQUEST I 


II. The Religious Value of the Olympians 


Now to some people this statement may seem a wilful 
paradox, yet I believe it to be true. The Olympian 
religion, radiating from Homer at the Panathenaea, pro- 
duced what I will venture to call exactly a religious 
reformation. Let us consider how, with all its flaws and 
falsehoods, it was fitted to attempt such a work. 

In the first place the Poems represent an Achaian 
tradition, the tradition of a Northern conquering race, 
organized on a patriarchal monogamous system vehe- 
mently distinct from the matrilinear customs of the 
Aegean or Hittite races, with their polygamy and 
polyandry, their agricultural rites, their sex-emblems 
and fertility goddesses. Contrast for a moment the 
sort of sexless Valkyrie who appears in the J/iad under 
the name of Athena with the Koré of Ephesus, strangely 
called Artemis, a shapeless fertility figure, covered 
with innumerable breasts. ‘That suggests the contrast 
that I mean. 

Secondly, the poems are by tradition aristocratic ; 
they are the literature of chieftains, alien to low 
popular superstition. ‘True, the poems as we have 
them are not Court poems. That error ought not 
to be so often repeated. As we have them they are 
poems recited at a Panegyris, or public festival. But 
they go back in ultimate origin to something like lays 
sung in a royal hall. And the contrast between the 
Homeric gods and the gods found outside Homer is 


well compared by Mr. Chadwick! to the difference 
1 Chap. xviii. 





II THE OLYMPIAN CONQUEST 81 


between the gods of the Edda and the historical traces 
of religion outside the Edda. The gods who feast with 
Odin in Asgard, forming an organized community or 
comitatus, seem to be the gods of the kings, distinct 
from the gods of the peasants, cleaner and more war- 
like and lordlier, though in actual religious quality 
much less vital. 

Thirdly, the poems in their main stages are Ionian, 
and Ionia was for many reasons calculated to lead the 
forward movement against the ‘Urdummheit’. For one 
thing, Ionia reinforced the old Heroic tradition, in 
having much the same inward freedom. The Ionians 
are the descendants of those who fled from the invaders 
across the sea, leaving their homes, tribes, and tribal 
traditions. Wilamowitz has well remarked how the 
imagination of the Greek mainland is dominated by 
the gigantic sepulchres of unknown kings, which the 
fugitives to Asia had left behind them and _ half 
forgotten.’ 

Again, when the Jonians settled on the Asiatic coasts 
they were no doubt to some extent influenced, but they 
were far more repelled by the barbaric tribes of the 
interior. They became conscious, as we have said, of 
something that was Hellenic, as distinct from some- 
thing else that was barbaric, and the Hellenic part 
of them vehemently rejected what struck them as 
superstitious, cruel, or unclean. And lastly, we must 
remember that Ionia was, before the rise of Athens, 
not only the most imaginative and intellectual part of 
Greece, but by far the most advanced in knowledge 


1 [Introduction to his edition of the Choéphoroe, p. 9. 
2960 L 


82 THE OLYMPIAN CONQUEST I 


and culture. ‘The Homeric religion is a step in the 
self-realization of Greece, and such self-realization 
naturally took its rise in Ionia. 

Granted, then, that Homer was calculated to pro- 
duce a kind of religious reformation in Greece, what 


kind of reformation was it? We are again reminded — 


of St. Paul. It was a move away from the ‘ beggarly 
elements ’ towards some imagined person behind them. 
The world was conceived as neither quite without 
external governance, nor as merely subject to the 
incursions of mana snakes and bulls and thunder-stones 
and monsters, but as governed by an organized body of 


personal and reasoning rulers, wiseand bountiful fathers, | 


like man in mind and shape, only unspeakably higher. 

For a type of this Olympian spirit we may take a 
phenomenon that has perhaps sometimes wearied us : 
the reiterated insistence in the reliefs of the best period 
on the strife of men against centaurs or of gods against 
giants. Our modern sympathies are apt to side 
with the giants and centaurs. An age of order likes 
romantic violence, as landsmen safe in their houses like 
storms at sea. But to the Greek, this battle was full 
of symbolical meaning. It is the strife, the ultimate 
victory, of human intelligence, reason, and gentleness, 
against what seems at first the overwhelming power 
of passion and unguided strength. It is Hellas against 
the brute world.! 


1 The spirit appears very simply in Eur. [ph. Taur. 386 ff., where 
Iphigenia rejects the gods who demand human sacrifice : 7 
These tales be false, false as those feastings wild 

Of Tantalus, and gods that tare a child. 





II ‘THE OLYMPIAN CONQUEST 83 


The victory of Hellenism over barbarism, of man 
over beast: that was the aim, but was it ever accom- 
plished? The Olympian gods as we see them in art 
appear so calm, so perfect, so far removed from the 
atmosphere of acknowledged imperfection and spiritual 
striving, that what I am now about to say may again 
seem a deliberate paradox. It is nevertheless true that 
the Olympian Religion is only to the full intelligible 
and admirable if we realize it as a superb and baffled 
endeavour, not a #elos or completion but a movement 
and effort of life. 

We may analyse the movement into three main 
elements: a moral expurgation of the old rites, an 
attempt to bring order into the old chaos, and lastly 
an adaptation to new social needs. We will take the 
three in order. 

In the first place, it gradually swept out of religion, 
or at least covered with a decent veil, that great mass 
of rites which was concerned with the Food-supply 
and the Tribe-supply and aimed at direct stimulation 


This land of murderers to its gods hath given 
Its own lust. Evil dwelleth not in heaven. 


Yet just before she has accepted the loves of Zeus and Leto without 
objection. ‘ Leto, whom Zeus loved, could never have given birth to 
such a monster!’ Cf. Plutarch, Vzt. Pelop. xxi, where Pelopidas, in 
rejecting the idea of a human sacrifice, says: ‘No high and more 
than human beings could be pleased with so barbarous and unlawful 
a sacrifice. It was not the fabled Titans and Giants who ruled 
the world, but one who was a Father of all gods and men.’ Of 
course, criticism and expurgation of the legends is too common 
to need illustration. See especially Kaibel, Daktyloz Idaio1, 1902, 


p. $12. 


84 THE OLYMPIAN CONQUEST I 


of generative processes.’ It left only a few reverent 
and mystic rituals, a few licensed outbursts of riotous 
indecency in comedy and the agricultural festivals. It 
swept away what seems to us a thing less dangerous, 
a large part of the worship of the dead. Such worship, 
our evidence shows us, gave a loose rein to superstition. 
To the Olympian movement it was vulgar, it was semi- 
barbarous, it was often bloody. We find that it has 
almost disappeared from Homeric Athens at a time 
when the monuments show it still flourishing in un- 
Homeric Sparta. The Olympian movement swept 
away also, at least for two splendid centuries, the 
worship of the man-god, with its diseased atmosphere 
of megalomania and blood-lust.2. These things return 
with the fall of Hellenism ; but the great period, as it 
urges man to use all his powers of thought, of daring 
and endurance, of social organization, so it bids him 
remember that he is a man like other men, subject to the 
same laws and bound to reckon with the same death. 

So much for the moral expurgation: next for the 
bringing of intellectual order. To parody the words 
of Anaxagoras, ‘In the early religion all things were 
together, till the Homeric system came and arranged 
them’. 

We constantly find in the Greek pantheon beings 
who can be described as rok\@v dvopatwy popd7) pia, 
‘one form of many names’. Each tribe, each little 
community, sometimes one may almost say each caste 

1 Aristophanes did much to reduce this element in comedy; see 


Clouds, 537 ff.: also Albany Review, 1907, p. 201. 
PRG ee), 1.30 & 


i THE OLYMPIAN CONQUEST 85 
—the Children of the Bards, the Children of the 


Potters—had its own special gods. Now as soon as 
there was any general ‘ Sunoikismos’ or ‘ Settling- 
together ’, any effective surmounting of the narrowest 
local barriers, these innumerable gods tended to melt 
into one another. Under different historical circum- 
stances this process might have been carried resolutely 
through and produced an intelligible pantheon in which 
each god had his proper function and there was no 
overlapping—one Koré, one Kouros, one Sun-God, and 
soon. But in Greece that was impossible. Imagina- 
tions had been too vivid, and local types had too often 
become clearly personified and differentiated. The 
Maiden of Athens, Athena, did no doubt absorb some 
other Korai, but she could not possibly combine with 
her of Cythéra or Cyprus, or Ephesus, nor with the 
Argive Koré or the Delian or the Brauronian. What. 
happened was that the infinite cloud of Maidens was 
greatly reduced and fell into four or five main types. 
The Korai of Cyprus, Cythéra, Corinth, Eryx, and some 
other places were felt to be one, and became absorbed 
in the great figure of Aphrodite. Artemis absorbed 
a quantity more, including those of Delos and Brauron, 
of various parts of Arcadia and Sparta, and even, as 
we saw, the fertility Koré of Ephesus. Doubtless she 
and the Delian were originally much closer together, 
but the Delian differentiated towards ideal virginity, 
the Ephesian towards ideal fruitfulness. The Kouroi, 
or Youths, in the same way were absorbed into some 
half-dozen great mythological shapes, Apollo, Ares, 
Hermes, Dionysus, and the like. 


86 THE OLYMPIAN CONQUEST II 


As so often in Greek development, we are brought 
up against the immense formative power of fiction or 
romance. The simple Koré or Kouros was a figure of 
indistinct outline with no history or personality. Like 
the Roman functional gods, such beings were hardly 
persons ; they melted easily one into another. But 
when the Greek imagination had once done its work 
upon them, a figure like Athena or Aphrodite had 
become, for all practical purposes, a definite person, 
almost as definite as Achilles or Odysseus, as Macbeth 
or Falstaff. ‘They crystallize hard. They will no 
longer melt or blend, at least not at an ordinary tem- 
perature. In the fourth and third centuries we hear 
a great deal about the gods all being one, ‘ Zeus the 
same as Hades, Hades as Helios, Helios the same as 
Dionysus ’,+ but the amalgamation only takes place in 
the white heat of ecstatic philosophy or the rites of 
religious mysticism. 

The best document preserved to us of this attempt 
to bring order into Chaos is the poetry of Hesiod. 
There are three poems, all devoted to this object, 
composed perhaps under the influence of Delphi and 
certainly under that of Homer, and trying in a quasi- 
Homeric dialect and under a quasi-Olympian system 
to bring together vast masses of ancient theology 
and folk-lore and scattered tradition. The Theogony 
attempts to make a pedigree and hierarchy of the 
Gods; The Catalogue of Women and the Eozaz, 


1 Justin, Cohort. c. 15. But such pantheistic language is common 
in Orphic and other mystic literature. See the fragments of the 
Orphic AtaOjxae (pp. 144 ff. in Abel’s Hymni). 


Nensistine 


{1 THE OLYMPIAN CONQUEST 87 


preserved only in scanty fragments, attempt to fix 
in canonical form the cloudy mixture of dreams and 
boasts and legends and hypotheses by which most 


‘royal families in central Greece recorded their descent 


from a traditional ancestress and a conjectural God. 
The Works and Days form an attempt to collect and 
arrange the rules and tabus relating to agriculture. 
The work of Hesiod as. a whole is one of the most valiant 
failures in literature. The confusion and absurdity 
of it are only equalled by its strange helpless beauty 
and its extraordinary historical interest. ‘The Hesiodic 
system when compared with that of Homer is much 
more explicit, much less expurgated, infinitely less 
accomplished and tactful. At the back of Homer lay 
the lordly warrior-gods of the Heroic Age, at the back 
of Hesiod the crude and tangled superstitions of the 
peasantry of the mainland. Also the Hesiodic poets 
worked in a comparatively backward and unenlightened 
atmosphere, the Homeric were exposed to the full light 
of Athens. 


The third element in this Homeric reformation is an 


_attempt to make religion satisfy the needs of a new 


‘social order. The earliest Greek religion was clearly 


based on the tribe,.a band of people, all in some sense 
kindred and normally living together, people with the 
same customs, ancestors, initiations, flocks and herds 
and fields. ‘This tribal and agricultural religion can 
hardly have maintained itself unchanged at the 
great Aegean centres, like Cnossus and Mycenae.’ It 


1 [ have not attempted to consider the Cretan cults. They lie 
historically outside the range of these essays, and I am not competent 


88 THE OLYMPIAN CONQUEST Il 


certainly did not maintain itself among the marauding 
chiefs of the heroic age. It bowed its head beneath 
the sceptre of its own divine kings and the armed heel 
of its northern invaders, only to appear again almost 
undamaged and unimproved when the kings were 
fallen and the invaders sunk into the soil like storms 
of destructive rain. 

But it no longer suited its environment. In the 
age of the migrations the tribes had been broken, 
scattered, re-mixed. They had almost ceased to exist 
as important social entities. The social unit which had 
taken their place was the political community of men, 
of whatever tribe or tribes, who were held together 
in times of danger and constant war by means of 
a common circuit-wall, a Polis.1 The idea of “the 
tribe remained. In the earliest classical period we 
find every Greek city still nominally composed of 
tribes, but the tribes are fictitious. The early city- 
makers could still only conceive of society on a tribal 
basis. Every local or accidental congregation of 


to deal with evidence that is purely archaeological. But in general 
I imagine the Cretan religion to be a development from the religion 
described in my first essay, affected both by the change in social 
structure from village to sea-empire and by foreign, especially Egyptian, 
influences. No doubt the Achaean gods were influenced on their side 
by Cretan conceptions, though perhaps not so much as Ionia was. Cf. 
the Cretan influences in Ionian vase-painting, and e.g. A. B. Cook on 
‘ Cretan Axe-cult outside Crete ’, Transactions of the Third International 
Congress for the Htstory of Religion, ii. 184. See also Sir A. Evans’s 
striking address on ‘ The Minoan and Mycenaean Element in Hellenic 
Life’, 7. H. S. xxxii. 277-97. 
PPDCE MN Gr iis 4 Del Out, 


il THE OLYMPIAN CONQUEST 89 


people who wish to act together have to invent an 
imaginary common ancestor. The clash between the 
old tribal traditions that have lost their meaning, 
though not their sanctity, and the new duties imposed 
by the actual needs of the Polis, leads to many strange 
and interesting compromises. ‘The famous constitu- 
tion of Cleisthenes shows several. An old proverb 
expresses well the ordinary feeling on the subject : 


7 , ¢? , 3’ > A » 
WS KE TONLS peEere, VOJLOS 5) apKX altos AaAPploTos. 


‘Whatever the City may do; but the old custom is 
the best.’ 


Now in the contest between city and tribe, the 
Olympian gods had one great negative advantage. 
They were not tribal or local, and all other gods were. 
They were by this time international, with no strong 
roots anywhere except where one of them could be 
identified with some native god; they were full of 
fame and beauty and prestige. They were ready to be 
made ‘ Poliouchoi’, ‘ City-holders ’, of any particular 
city, still more ready to be ‘ Hellanioi’, patrons of al 


Hellas. 


In the working out of these three aims the Olympian 
religion achieved much: in all three it failed. The 
moral expurgation failed owing to the mere force of 
inertia possessed by old religious traditions and local 
cults. We must remember how weak any central 
government was in ancient civilization. ‘The power 
and influence of a highly civilized society were apt to 
end a few miles outside its city wall. All through 

2960 M 


go THE OLYMPIAN CONQUEST il 


the backward parts of Greece obscene and cruel rites 
lingered on, the darker and worse the further they were 
removed from the full light of Hellenism. 

But in this respect the Olympian Religion did not 
merely fail: it did worse. ‘To make the elements of 
- a nature-religion human is inevitably to make them 
vicious. ‘There is no great moral harm in worshipping 
a thunder-storm, even though the lightning strikes the 
good and evil quite recklessly. There is no need to 
pretend that the Lightning is exercising a wise and 
righteous choice. But when once you worship an 
imaginary quasi-human being who throws the light- 
ning, you areina dilemma. Either you have to admit 
that you are worshipping and flattering a being with 
no moral sense, because he happens to be dangerous, 
or else you have to invent reasons for his wrath against 
the people who happen to be struck. And they are 
pretty sure to be bad reasons. The god, if personal, 
becomes capricious and cruel. 

When the Ark of Israel was being brought back from 
the Philistines, the cattle slipped by the threshing 
floor of Nachon, and the holy object was in danger 
of falling. A certain Uzzah, as we all know, sprang 
forward to save it and was struck dead for his pains. 
Now, if he was struck dead by the sheer holiness of the 
tabu object, the holiness stored inside it like so much 
electricity, his death was a misfortune, an interesting 
accident, and no more.! But when it is made into 
the deliberate act of an anthropomorphic god, who 


1 2Sam.vi 6. Sce S. Reinach, Orpheus, p. § (English ‘Translation, 
p- 4). 


I THE OLYMPIAN CONQUEST gI 


strikes a well-intentioned man dead in explosive rage 
for a very pardonable mistake, a dangerous element 
has been introduced into the ethics of that religion. 
A being who is the moral equal of man must not behave 
like a charge of dynamite. 

Again, to worship emblems of fertility and generation, 
as was done in agricultural rites all through the Aegean 
area, is in itself an intelligible and not necessarily 
a degrading practice. But when those emblems are 
somehow humanized, and the result is an anthropo- 
morphic god of enormous procreative power and in- 
numerable amours, a religion so modified has received 
a death-blow. The step that was meant to soften its 
grossness has resulted in its moral degradation. ‘This 
result was intensified by another well-meant effort at 
elevation. The leading tribes of central Greece were, 
as we have mentioned, apt to count their descent from 
some heroine-ancestress. Her consort was sometimes 
unknown and, in a matrilinear society, unimportant. 
Sometimes he was a local god or river. When the 
Olympians came to introduce some order and unity 
among these innumerable local gods, the original tribal 
ancestor tended, naturally enough, to be identified 
with Zeus, Apollo, or Poseidon. The unfortunate 
Olympians, whose system really aimed:at purer morals 
and condemned polygamy and polyandry, are left with 
a crowd of consorts that would put Solomon to shame. 

Thus a failure in the moral expurgation was deepened 
by a failure in the attempt to bring intellectual order 
into the welter of primitive gods. The only satisfac- 


tory end of that effort- would-have been monotheism. ~ 


92 THE OLYMPIAN CONQUEST I 


If Zeus had only gone further and become completely, 
once and for all, the father of all life, the scandalous 
stories would have lost their point and meaning. It is ; 
curious how near to monotheism, and to monotheism : 
of a very profound and impersonal type, the real reli- 
gion of Greece came in the sixth and fifth centuries. 
Many of the philosophers, Xenophanes, Parmenides, 
and others, asserted it clearly or assumed it without 
hesitation. Aeschylus, Euripides, Plato, in their deeper 
moments point the same road. Indeed a metaphysician 
might hold that their theology is far deeper than that 
to which we are accustomed, since they seem not to 
make any particular difference between oi Oeot and 
6 Jeds or 75 Oetov. ‘They do not instinctively suppose 
that the human distinctions between ‘ he’ and ‘it’, 
or between ‘ one’ and ‘ many’, apply to the divine. 
Certainly Greek monotheism, had it really carried 
the day, would have been a far more philosophic 
thing than the tribal and personal monotheism of 
the Hebrews. But unfortunately too many hard- 
caked superstitions, too many tender and sensitive 
associations, were linked with particular figures in 
the pantheon or particular rites which had brought 
the worshippers religious peace. If there had been 
some Hebrew prophets about, and a tyrant or two, 
progressive and bloody-minded, to agree with them, 
polytheism might perhaps actually have been stamped 
out in Greece at one time. But Greek thought, 
always sincere and daring, was seldom brutal, seldom 
ruthless or cruel. The thinkers of the great period 
felt their own way gently to the Holy of Hollies, and 





I ~ THE OLYMPIAN CONQUEST 93 


did not try to compel others to take the same way. 
Greek theology, whether popular or philosophical 
seldom denied any god, seldom forbade any worship. 
What it tried to do was to identify every new god with 
some aspect of one of the old ones, and the result was 
naturally confusion. Apart from the Epicurean school, 
which though powerful was always unpopular, the 
religious thought of later antiquity for the most part 
took refuge in a sort of apotheosis of good taste, in 
which the great care was not to hurt other people’s 
feelings, or else it collapsed into helpless mysticism. 
The attempt to make Olympianism a religion of the 
Polis failed also. The Olympians did not belong to 
any particular city: they were too universal ; and no 
particular city had a very positive faith in them. 
The actual Polis was real and tangible, the Homeric 
gods_a-little alien and literary. The City herself was 
a most real power ; and the true gods of the City, who 
had grown out of the soil and the wall, were simply 
the City herself in her eternal and personal aspect, as 
mother and guide and lawgiver, the worshipped and 
beloved being whom each citizen must defend even 
to the death. As the Kouros of his day emerged from 
the social group of Kouroi, or the Aphiktor from the 
band of suppliants, in like fashion 7 TloAuds or 6 Hodtevs 
emerged as a personification or projection of the city. 
7 Ilodvas in Athens was of course Athena ; 6 IloAevs 
might as well be called Zeus as anything else. In 
reality such beings fall into the same class as the hero 
Argos or ‘ Korinthos son of Zeus’. ‘The City worship 
was narrow ; yet to broaden it was, except in some 


94 THE OLYMPIAN CONQUEST 11 


rare minds, to sap its life. The ordinary man finds it 
impossible to love his next-door neighbours except 
by siding with them against the next-door-but-one. 

It proved difficult even in a city like Athens to have 
gods that would appeal to the loyalty of all Attica. On 
the Acropolis at Athens there seem originally to have 
been Athena and some Kouros corresponding with her, 
some Waterer of the earth, like Erechtheus. ‘Then 
as Attica was united and brought under the lead of 
its central city, the gods of the outlying districts began 
to claim places on the Acropolis. Pallas, the thunder- 
maid of Pallene in the south, came to form a joint 
personality with Athena. Oinoe, a town in the north- 
east, on the way from Delos to Delphi, had for its 
special god a ‘ Pythian Apollo’ ; when Oinoe became 
Attic a place for the Pythian Apollo had to be found 
on the Acropolis. Dionysus came from Eleutherae, 
Demeter and Koré from Eleusis, ‘Theseus himself 
perhaps from Marathon or even from Trozén. They 
were all given official residences on Athena’s rock, 
and Athens in return sent out Athena to new 
temples built for her in Prasiae and Sunion and 
various colonies.' This development came step by 
step and grew out of real worships. It was quite 
different from the wholesale adoption of a body of 
non-national, poetical gods: yet even this develop- 
ment was too artificial, too much stamped with the 
marks of expediency and courtesy and compromise. 
It could not live. The personalities of such gods 
vanish away; their prayers become prayers to ‘all 


+ Cf. Sam Wide in Gercke and Norden’s Handbuch, ii. 217-19. 





Il THE OLYMPIAN CONQUEST 9 5 


gods and goddesses of the City ’"—eots cat Denar macr 
kat maonot; those who remain, chiefly Athena and 
Theseus, only mean Athens. 


What then, amid all this failure, did the Olympian 


religion really achieve? First, it debarbarized they 


worship of the leading states of Greece—not of all 
Greece, since antiquity had no means of spreading 


knowledge comparable to ours. It reduced the horrors | 


of the ‘ Urdummheit ’, for the most part, to a ro- 


mantic memory, and made religion no longer a mortal \/ 


danger to humanity. Unlike many religious systems, it 


generally permitted progress ; it encouraged not only, 
the obedient virtues but the daring virtues as well. — 


It had in it the spirit that saves from disaster, that 
knows itself fallible and thinks twice before it hates 


and curses and persecutes. It wrapped religion in’ 


Sophrosyné. 

Again, it worked for concord and fellow-feeling 
throughout the Greek communities. It is, after all, 
a good deal to say, that in Greek history we find 
almost no warring of sects, no mutual tortures or even 
blasphemies. With many ragged edges, with many 
weaknesses, it built up something like a united Hellenic 
religion to stand against the ‘ beastly devices of the 
heathen’. And after all, if we are inclined on the 
purely religious side to judge the Olympian system 
harshly, we must not forget its sheer beauty. Truth, 
no doubt, is greater than beauty. But in many matters 
beauty can be attained and truth cannot. All we know 
is that when the best minds seek for truth the result 
is apt to be beautiful. It was a great thing that men 


96 THE OLYMPIAN CONQUEST i 


should envisage the world as governed, not by Giants 
and Gorgons and dealers in eternal torture, but by 
some human and more than human Understanding 
(Evvects),' by beings of quiet splendour like many a 
classical Zeus and Hermes and Demeter. If Olym- 
pianism was not a religious faith, it was at least a vital 
force in the shaping of cities and societies which remain 
after two thousand years a type to the world of beauty 
and freedom and high endeavour. Even the stirring 
of its ashes, when they seemed long cold, had power 
to produce something of the same result; for the 
classicism of the Italian Renaissance is a child, however 
fallen, of the Olympian spirit. 

Of course, I recognize that beauty is not the same as 
faith. ‘There is, in one sense, far more faith in some 
hideous miracle-working icon which sends out starving 
peasants to massacre Jews than in the Athena of Phidias. 
Yet, once we have rid our minds of trivial mythology, 
there is religion in Athena also. Athena is an ideal, 
an ideal and a mystery ; the ideal of wisdom, of inces- 
sant labour, of almost terrifying purity, seen through 
the light of some mystic and spiritual devotion like, but 
transcending, the love of man for woman. Or, if the 
way of Athena is too hard for us common men, it is not 
hard to find a true religious ideal in such a figure as 
Persephone. In Persephone there is more of pathos and 


The Svveors in which the Chorus finds it hard to believe, Hippo- 
lytus, 1105. Cf. Iph. Aul. 394, 1189; Herc. 655; also the ideas in 
Suppl. 203, Eur. Fr. $2, 9, where Ruveors is implanted in man by a special 
grace of God. The gods are éuvero/, but of course Euripides goes too 
far in actually praying to Bvveous, Ar. Frogs, 893. 





I THE OLYMPIAN CONQUEST 97 


of mystery. She has more recently entered the calm 
ranks of Olympus; the old liturgy of the dying and 
re-risen Year-bride still clings to her. If Religion is 
that which brings us into relation with the great 
world-forces, there is the very heart of life in this 
home-coming Bride of the underworld, life with its 
broken hopes, its disaster, its new-found spiritual joy : 
life seen as Mother and Daughter, not a thing con- 
tinuous and unchanging but shot through with parting 
and death, life as a great love or desire ever torn asunder 
and ever renewed. 

‘ Butistay;; a reader may) object :)"19\ not) this); the 
Persephone, the Athena, of modern sentiment? Are 
these figures really the goddesses of the Llzad and of 
Sophocles?’ ‘The truth is, I think, that they are neither/ 
the one nor the other. They are the goddesses of 
ancient reflection and allegory ; the goddesses, that is, 
of the best and most’ characteristic worship that these 
idealized creations awakened. What we have treated 
hitherto as the mortal weakness of the Olympians, the 
fact that they have no roots in any particular soil, little 
hold on any definite primeval cult, has turned out 
to be their peculiar strength. We must not think of 
allegory as a late post-classical phenomenon in Greece. 
It begins at least as early as Pythagoras and Heraclitus, 
perhaps as early as Hesiod ; for Hesiod seems sometimes 
to be turning allegory back into myth. The Olym- 
pians, cut loose from the soil, enthroned only in men’s 
free imagination, have two special regions which they 
have made their own: mythology and allegory. The 
mythology drops for the most part very early out 

2960 N 


98 THE OLYMPIAN CONQUEST ul 


of practical religion. Even in Homer we find it 
expurgated ; in Pindar, Aeschylus, and Xenophanes 
it is expurgated, denied and allegorized. The myths 
survive chiefly as material for literature, the shapes of 
the gods themselves chiefly as material for art. They 
are both of them objects not of belief but of imagina- 
tion. Yet when the religious imagination of Greece 
deepens it twines itself still round these gracious and 
ever-moving shapes ; the Zeus of Aeschylus moves on 
into the Zeus of Plato or of Cleanthes or of Marcus 
Aurelius. Hermes, Athena, Apollo, all have their long 
spiritual history. They are but little impeded by the 
echoes of the old frivolous mythology; still less by 
any local roots or sectional prejudices or compulsory 
details of ritual. As the more highly educated mind 
of Greece emerged from a particular, local, tribal, 
conception of religion, the old denationalized Olym- 
pians were ready to receive her. 

The real religion of the fifth century was, as we have 


more discord and more criticism in Euripides and 


Plato; for the indignant blasphemies of the Gorgias _ 


and the Troades bear the same message as the ideal 
patriotism of the Republic. It is expressed best 
perhaps, and that without mention of the name of 
a single god, in the great Funeral Speech of Pericles. 
It is higher than most modern patriotism because it is 
set upon higher ideals. It is more fervid because the 
men practising it lived habitually nearer to the danger- 
point, and, when they spoke of dying for the City, 





| 


i THE OLYMPIAN CONQUEST 99 


spoke of a thing they had faced last week and might 
face again to-morrow. It was more religious because of 
the unconscious mysticism in which it is clothed even 
by such hard heads as Pericles and Thucydides, the 
mysticism of men in the presence of some fact for 
which they have no words great enough. Yet for all 
its intensity 1t was condemned by its mere narrowness. 
By the fourth century the average Athenian must 
have recognized what philosophers had recognized long 
before, that a religion, to be true, must be universal 
and not the privilege of a particular people. As soon 
as the Stoics had proclaimed the world to be ‘ one 
great City of gods and men ’, the only Gods with which 
Greece could satisfactorily people that City were the 
idealized band of the old Olympians. 

They are artists’ dreams, ideals, allegories; they 
are symbols of something beyond themselves. They 
are Gods of half-rejected tradition, of unconscious 
make-believe, of aspiration. They are gods to whom 
doubtful philosophers can pray, with all a philosopher’s 
due caution, as to so many radiant and heart-searching 
hypotheses. They are not gods in whom any one 
believes as a hard fact. Does this condemn them? 
Or is it just the other way? Is it perhaps that one 
difference between Religion and Superstition lies 
exactly in this, that Superstition degrades its worship 
by turning its beliefs into so many statements of brute 
fact, on which it must needs act without question, 
without striving, without any respect for others or any 
desire for higher or fuller truth? It is only an accident 
—though perhaps an invariable accident—that all the 


100 THE OLYMPIAN CONQUEST Il 


supposed facts are false. In Religion, however precious 
you may consider the truth you draw from it, you 
know that it is a truth seen dimly, and possibly seen 
by others better than by you. You know that all your 
creeds and definitions are merely metaphors, attempts 
to use human language for a purpose for which it was 
never made. Your concepts are, by the nature of 
things, inadequate ; the truth is not in you but beyond 
you, a thing not conquered but still to be pursued. 
Something like this, I take it, was the character of 
the Olympian Religion in the higher minds of later 
Greece. Its gods could awaken man’s worship and 
strengthen his higher aspirations; but at heart they 
knew themselves to be only metaphors. As the most 
beautiful image carved by man was not the god, but 
only a symbol, to help towards conceiving the god ; ? 


1 Cf. the beautiful defence of idols by Maximus of Tyre, Or. viii Gn 
Wilamowitz’s Lesebuch, 11. 338 ff.). I quote the last paragraph : 

‘God Himself, the father and fashioner of all that is, older than the 
Sun or the Sky, greater than time and eternity and all the flow of being, 
is unnameable by any lawgiver, unutterable by any voice, not to be 
seen by any eye. But we, being unable to apprehend His essence, use 
the help of sounds and names and pictures, of beaten gold and ivory 
and silver, of plants and rivers, mountain-peaks and torrents, yearning 
for the knowledge of Him, and in our weakness naming all that is 
beautiful in this world after His nature—just as happens to earthly 
lovers. ‘To them the most beautiful sight will be the actual lineaments 
of the beloved, but for remembrance’ sake they will be happy in the 
sight of a lyre, a little spear, a chair, perhaps, or a running-ground, or 
anything in the world that wakens the memory of the beloved. Why 
should I further examine and pass judgement about Images? Let 
men know what is divine (ro Getov yévos), let them know : that is all. 
If a Greek is stirred to the remembrance of God by the art of Pheidias, 





II THE OLYMPIAN CONQUEST 101 


so the god himself, when conceived, was not the reality 
but only a symbol to help towards conceiving the 
reality. ‘That was the work set before them. Mean- 
time they issued no creeds that contradicted knowledge, 
no commands that made man sin against his own inner 


light. 


an Egyptian by paying worship to animals, another man by a river, 
another by fire—I have no anger for their divergences ; only let them 
know, let them love, let them remember.’ 


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Ill 
THE GREAT SCHOOLS OF THE 
FOURTH CENTURY, ».c. 


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ITI 


THE GREAT SCHOOLS OF THE 
FOURTH CENTURY, .,.c. 


THERE is a passage in Xenophon describing how, one 
summer night, in 405 B.c., people in Athens heard a 
cry of wailing, an ozmogé, making its way up between 
the long walls from the Piraeus, and coming nearer and 
nearer as they listened. It was the news of the final 
disaster of Kynoskephalai, brought at midnight to the 
Piraeus by the galley Paralos. ‘ And that night no one 
slept. They wept for the dead, but far more bitterly 
for themselves, when they reflected what things they 
had done to the people of Mélos, when taken by siege, 
to the people of Histiaea, and Skioné and Tordéné and 
Aegina, and many more of the Hellenes.’ * 

The echo of that lamentation seems to ring behind 
most of the literature of the fourth century, and not the 
Athenian literature alone. Defeat can on occasion 
leave men their self-respect or even their pride ; as it 
did after Chaeronea in 338 and after the Chremonidean 
War in 262, not to speak of Thermopylae. But the 
defeat of 404 not only left Athens at the mercy of her 
enemies. It stripped her of those things of which she 
had been inwardly most proud; her ‘ wisdom’, her 
high civilization, her leadership of all that was most 


La elcH. M2443) 
2960 oO 


106 THE GREAT SCHOOLS OF il 
Hellenic in Hellas. The ‘ Beloved City’ of Pericles 


had become a tyrant, her nature poisoned by war, her 
government a by-word in Greece for brutality. And 
Greece as a whole felt the tragedy of it. It is curious 
~ how this defeat of Athens by Sparta seems to have been 
felt abroad as a defeat for Greece itself and for the 
hopes of the Greek city state. The fall of Athens 
mattered more than the victory of Lysander. Neither 
Sparta nor any other city ever attempted to take her 
place. And no writer after the year 400 speaks of any 
other city as Pericles used to speak of fifth-century 
Athens, not even Polybius 250 years later, when he 
stands amazed before the solidity and the ‘ fortune ’ 
of Rome. 

The city state, the Polis, had concentrated upon 
itself almost all the loyalty and the aspirations of the 
Greek mind. It gave security to life. It gave mean- 
ing to.religion. And in the fall of Athens it-had 
failed. In the third century, when things begin to 
recover, we find on the one hand the great military 
monarchies of Alexander’s successors, and on the 
other, a number of federations of tribes, which were 
generally strongest in the backward regions where 
the city state had been least developed. 6 kowov 
tov Atrwlov or trav “Ayatov had become more 
important than Athens or Corinth, and Sparta was 
only strong by means of a League.’ By that time the 
Polis was recognized as a comparatively weak social 
organism, capable of very high culture but not quite 
able, as the Covenant of the League of Nations 


! Cf. Tarn, Antigonus Gonatas, p. 52, and authorities there quoted. 


III THE FOURTH CENTURY, B.c. 107 


expresses it, ‘to hold its own under the strenuous 
conditions of modern life’. Besides, it was not now 
ruled by the best citizens. The best had turned away 
from politics. 

This great discouragement did not take place at 
a blow. Among the practical statesmen probably 
most did not form any theory about the cause of the 
failure but went on, as practical statesmen must, doing 
as best they could from difficulty to difficulty. But 
many saw that the fatal danger to Greece was disunion, 
as many see it in Europe now. When Macedon proved 
indisputably stronger than Athens Isocrates urged 
Philip to accept the leadership of Greece against the 
barbarian and against barbarism. He might thus both 
unite the Greek cities and also evangelize the world. 
Lysias, the democratic and anti-Spartan orator, had 
been groping for a similar solution as early as 384 B.c., 
and was prepared to make an even sharper sacrifice for 
it. He appealed at Olympia for a crusade of all the 
free Greek cities against Dionysius of Syracuse, and 
begged Sparta herself to lead it. The Spartans are ‘ of 
right the leaders of Hellas by their natural nobleness 
and their skill in war. They alone live still in a city 
unsacked, unwalled, unconquered, uncorrupted by 
faction, and have followed always the same modes of 
life. ‘They have been the saviours of Hellas in the past, 
and one may hope that their freedom will be ever- 
lasting.’ A great and generous change in one who 
had ‘ learned by suffering’ in the Peloponnesian War. 
Others no doubt merely gave their submission to the 


1 Lysias, xxxiii. 


108 THE GREAT SCHOOLS OF Ill 


stronger powers that were now rising. ‘There were 
openings for counsellors, for mercenary soldiers, for 
court savants and philosophers and poets, and, of 
course, for agents in every free city who were prepared 
for one motive or another not to kick against the pricks. 
And there were always also those who had neither 
learned nor forgotten, the unrepentant idealists ; too 
passionate or too heroic.or, as some will say, too blind, 
to abandon their life-long devotion to *‘ Athens’ or to 
‘Freedom’ because the world considered such ideals 
out of date. They could look the ruined Athenians in 
the face, after the lost battle, and say with Demos- 
thenes, ‘Ovx éotwv, ok eoTW OoTws ypdprere. It 
cannot be that you did wrong, it cannot be!’ ? 

But in practical politics the currents of thought are 
inevitably limited. It is in philosophy and speculation 
that we find the richest and most varied reaction to the 
Great Failure. It takes different shapes in those writers, 
like Plato and Xenophon, who were educated in the 
fifth century and had once believed in the Great City, 
and those whose whole thinking life belonged to the 
time of disillusion. 

Plato was disgusted with democracy and with Athens, 
but he retained his faith in the city, if only the city 
could be set on the right road. There can be little 
doubt that he attributes to the bad government of the 
Demos many evils which were really due to extraneous 
causes or to the mere fallibility of human nature. Still 
his analysis of democracy is one of the most brilliant 
things in the history of political theory. It is so acute, 


1 Dem. Crown, 208. 


111 THE FOURTH CENTURY, 8.c. 109 


so humorous, so affectionate ; and at many different 
ages of the world has seemed like a portrait of the 
actual contemporary society. Like a modern popular 
newspaper, Plato’s democracy makes it its business to 
satisfy existing desires and give people a ‘ good time’. 
It does not distinguish between higher and lower. Any 
one man is as good as another, and so is any impulse or 
any idea. Consequently the commoner have the pull. 
Even the great democratic statesmen of the past, he 
now sees, have been ministers to mob desires; they 
have ‘ filled the city with harbours and docks and walls 
and revenues and such-like trash, without Sophrosyné 
and righteousness’. ‘The sage or saint has no place in 
practical politics. He would be like a man in a den of 
wild beasts. Let him and his like seek shelter as best 
they can, standing up behind some wall while the storm 
of dust and sleet rages past. ‘he world does not want 
truth, which is all that he could give it. It goes by 
appearances and judges its great men with their clothes 
on and their rich relations round them. After death, 
the judges will judge them naked, and alone; and then 
we shall see! ! 

Yet, in spite of all this, the child of the fifth century 
cannot keep his mind from politics. The speculations 
which would be scouted by the mass in the market- 
place can still be discussed with intimate friends and 
disciples, or written in books for the wise to read. 
Plato’s two longest works are attempts to construct an 
ideal society ; first, what may be called a City of 

1 ¢*Such-like trash’, Gorgias, 519 a; dust-storm, Rep. vi. 496; 
clothes, Gorg. 523 £; ‘democratic man’, Rep. viii. 556 ff. 


110 THE GREAT SCHOOLS OF Il 


Righteousness, in the Republic ; and afterwards in his 
old age, in the Laws, something more like a City of 
Refuge, uncontaminated by the world; a little city 
on a hill-top away in Crete, remote from commerce and 
riches and the ‘ bitter and corrupting sea ’ which carries 
them; a city where life shall move in music and 
discipline and reverence for the things that are greater 
than man, and the songs men sing shall be not common 
songs but the preambles of the city’s laws, showing 
their purpose and their principle ; where no wall will 
be needed to keep out the possible enemy, because the 
courage and temperance of the citizens will be wall 
enough, and if war comes the women equally with the 
men ‘ will fight for their young, as birds do’. 

This hope is very like despair; but, such as it is, 
Plato’s thought is always directed towards the city. 
No other form of social life ever tempts him away, and 
he anticipates no insuperable difficulty in keeping the 
city in the right path if once he can get it started right. 
The first step, the necessary revolution, is what makes 
the difficulty. And he sees only one way. In real life 
he had supported the conspiracy of the extreme 
oligarchs in 404 which led to the rule of the ‘ Thirty 
Tyrants’; but the experience sickened him of such 
methods. ‘There was no hope unless, by some lucky 
combination, a philosopher should become a king or 
some young king turn philosopher. ‘ Give me a city 
governed by a tyrant,’ he says in the Laws,! ‘and let 
the tyrant be young, with a good memory, quick at 
learning, of high courage, and a generous nature.... 


1 Laws, 709 £, cf. Letter VII. 


Il THE FOURTH CENTURY, B.c. III 


And besides, let him have a wise counsellor!’ Ironical 
fortune granted him an opportunity to try the experi- 
ment himself at the court of Syracuse, first with the 
elder and then, twenty years later, with the younger 
Dionysius (387 and 367 3.c.). It is a story of dis- 
appointment, of course; bitter, humiliating and ludi- 
crous disappointment, but with a touch of that 
sublimity which seems so often to hang about the 
errors of the wise. One can study them in Seneca 
at the court of Nero, or in Turgot with Louis; not 
so well perhaps in Voltaire with Frederick. Plato 
failed in his enterprise, but he did keep faith with 
the ‘ Righteous City ’. 

Another of the Socratic circle turned in a different 
direction. Xenophon,..an exile from his country, 
a brilliant soldier and adventurer as well as a man of 
letters, is perhaps the first Greek on record who openly 
lost interest in the city. He thought less about cities 

‘and constitutions than about great men and nations, 
or generals and armies. To him it was idle to spin 
cobweb formations of ideal laws and communities. 
Society is right enough if you have a really fine man to 
lead it. It may be that his ideal was formed in child- 
hood by stories of Pericles and the great age when 
Athens was ‘in name a democracy but in truth an 
empire of one leading man’. He gave form to his 
dream in the Education of Cyrus, an imaginary account 
of the training which formed Cyrus the Great into an 
ideal king and soldier. The Cyropaedeia is said to have 
been intended as a counterblast to Plato’s Republic, and 
it may have provoked Plato’s casual remark in the 


112 THE GREAT SCHOOLS OF It 


Laws that ‘ Cyrus never so much as touched education ’. 
No doubt the book suffered in persuasiveness from being 
so obviously fictitious." For example, the Cyrus of 
Xenophon dies peacefully in his bed after much 
affectionate and edifying advice to his family, whereas 
all Athens knew from Herodotus how the real Cyrus 
had been killed in a war against the Massagetae, and 
his head, to slake its thirst for that liquid, plunged into 
a wineskin full of human blood. Perhaps also the 
monarchical rule of Cyrus was too absolute for Greek 
taste. At any rate, later on Xenophon adopted a more 
real hero, whom he had personally known and admired. 

Agesilaus, king of Sparta, had been taken as a type of 
‘virtue’ even by the bitter historian Theopompus. 
Agesilaus was not only a great general. He knew how 
to ‘honour the gods, do his duty in the field, and to 
practise obedience’. He was true to friend and foe. 
On one memorable occasion he kept his word even 
to an enemy who had broken his. He enjoined kindness 
to enemy captives. When he found small children 
left behind by the barbarians in some town that he 
occupied—because either their parents or the slave- 
merchants had no room for them—he always took care 
of them or gave them to guardians of their own race: 
‘he never let the dogs and wolves get them’. On the 
other hand, when he sold his barbarian prisoners he 
sent them to market naked, regardless of their modesty, 
because it cheered his own soldiers to see how white 
and fat they were. He wept when he won a victory 


1 Aulus Gellius, xiv. 3; Plato, Laws, p. 695; Xen. Cyrop. viii. 7, 
compared with Hdz. i. 214. 


I THE FOURTH CENTURY, s.c. 113 
over Greeks ; ‘for he loved all Greeks and only hated 


barbarians’. When he returned home after his success- 
ful campaigns, he obeyed the orders of the ephors 
without question; his house and furniture were as 
simple as those of a common man, and his daughter 
the princess, when she went to and fro toAmyclae, went 
simply in the public omnibus. He reared chargers and 
hunting dogs ; the rearing of chariot horses he thought 
effeminate. But he advised his sister Cynisca about 
hers, and she won the chariot race at Olympia. ‘ Have 
a king like that’, says Xenophon, ‘ and all will be well. 
He will govern right ; he will beat your enemies ; and 
he will set an example of good life. If you want Virtue 
in the state look for it in a good man, not in a specula- 
tive tangle of laws. ‘The Spartan constitution, as it 
stands, is good enough for any one.’ 

But it was another of the great Socratics who 
uttered first the characteristic message of the fourth 
century, and met the blows of Fortune with a direct 
challenge. Antisthenes was a man twenty years older 
than Plato. He had fought at Tanagra in 426 B.c. 
He had been friends with Gorgias and Prodicus, the 
great Sophists of the Periclean age. He seems to have 
been, at any rate till younger and more brilliant men 
cut him out, the recognized philosophic heir of 
Socrates.! And late in life, after the fall of Athens and 
the condemnation and death of his master, the man 
underwent a curious change of heart. He is taunted 

1 This is the impression left by Xenophon, especially in the Sympo- 
sium. Cf. Diimmler, Antisthenica (1882) ; Akademtka (1889). Cf. the 


Life of Antisthenes in Diog. Laert. 
2960 P 


T14 THE GREAT SCHOOLS OF III 


more than once with the lateness of his discovery of 
truth,! and with his childish subservience to the old 
jeux d’esprit of the Sceptics which professed to prove 
the impossibility of knowledge.” It seems that he had 
lost faith in speculation and dialectic and the elaborate 
superstructures which Plato and others had built upon 
them; and he felt, like many moralists after him, 
a sort of hostility to all knowledge that was not 
immediately convertible into conduct. 

But this scepticism was only part of a general dis- 
belief in the world. Greek philosophy had from the 
first been concerned with a fundamental question 
which we moderns seldom put clearly to ourselves. 
It asked ‘ What is the Good ?’ meaning thereby ‘ What 
is the element of value in life?” or ‘What should be our 
chief aim in living?’ A medieval Christian would have 
answered without hesitation ‘To go to Heaven and 
not be damned’, and would have been prepared with 
the necessary prescriptions for attaining that end. 
But the modern world is not intensely enough con- 


1 Tépwv ovabys, Plato, Soph. 251 B, Isocr. Helena, i. 2. 

2 e. g. no combination of subject and predicate can be true because 
one is different from the other. ‘Man’ is ‘man’ and ‘ good’ is 
‘good’; but ‘man’ is not ‘good’. Nor can ‘a horse’ possibly be 
‘running’; they are totally different conceptions. See Plutarch, 
adv, Co. 22, 1 (p. 1119) ; Plato, Soph. 2518; Arist. Metaph. 1024" 33; 
Top. 104” 20; Plato, Euthyd. 285 x. For similar reasons no statement 
can ever contradict another ; the statements are either the same or not 
the same; and if not the same they do not touch. Every object has 
one Noyos or thing to be said about it ; if you say a different Adyos you 
are speaking of something else. See especially Scholia Arist., p. 732° 30 ff. 
on the passage in the Metaphysics, 1024 33, 


it THE FOURTH CENTURY, 3.c. 115 


vinced of the reality of Sin and Judgement, Hell and 
Heaven, to accept this answer as an authoritative guide 
in life, and has not clearly thought out any other. The 
ancient Greek spent a great part of his philosophical 
activity in trying, without propounding supernatural 
rewards and punishments, or at least without laying 
stress on them, to think out what the Good of man_ 
ee donk here bn 

_ The answers given by mankind to this question seem 
to fall under two main heads. Before a battle if both 
parties were asked what aim they were pursuing, both 
would say without hesitation ‘ Victory’. After the 
battle, the conqueror would probably say that his 
purpose was in some way to consolidate or extend his 
victory ; but the beaten party, as soon as he had time 
to think, would perhaps explain that, after all, victory 
was not everything. It was better to have fought for 
the right, to have done your best and to have failed, 
than to revel in the prosperity of the unjust. And, 
since it is difficult to maintain, in the midst of the 
triumph of the enemy and your own obvious misery 
and humiliation, that all is well and you yourself 
thoroughly contented, this second answer easily 
develops a third: ‘ Wait a little, till God’s judgement 
asserts itself; and see who has the best of it then!’ 
There will be a rich reward hereafter for the suffering 
virtuous. 

The typical Athenian of the Periclean age would 
have been in the first state of mind. His ‘ good’ would 
be in the nature of success: to spread Justice and 
Freedom, to make Athens happy and strong and her 


116 THE GREAT SCHOOLS OF Ill 


laws wise and equal for rich and poor. Antisthenes 
had fallen violently into the second. He was defeated 
together with all that he most cared for, and he com- 
forted himself with the thought that nothing matters 
except to have done your best. As he phrased it 
Areté is the good, Areté meaning ‘ virtue’ or ‘ good- 
ness’, the quality of a good citizen, a good father, 
a good dog, a good sword. 

The things of the world are vanity, and philosophy 
as vain as the rest. Nothing but goodness is good ; 
and the first step towards attaining it is to repent. | 

There was in Athens a gymnasium built for those 
who were base-born and could not attend the gymnasia 
of true citizens. It was called Kynosarges and was 
dedicated to the great bastard, Heracles. Antisthenes, 
though he had moved hitherto in the somewhat 
patrician circle of the Socratics, remembered now that 
his mother was a ‘Thracian slave, and set up his school 
in Kynosarges among the disinherited of the earth. 
He made friends with the ‘ bad ’, who needed befriend- 
ing. He dressed like the poorest workman. He would 
accept no disciples except those who could bear hard- 
ship, and was apt to drive new-comers away with his 
stick. Yet he also preached in the streets, both in 
Athens and Corinth. He preached rhetorically, with 
parables and vivid emotional phrases, compelling the 
attention of the crowd. His eloquence was held to be 
bad style, and it started the form of literature known to 
the Cynics as ypeia, ‘a help’, or duatpuBy ‘a study ’, 
and by the Christians as 6utdia, a ‘ homily ’ or sermon. 

This passionate and ascetic old man would have 


Ill THE FOURTH CENTURY, .B.c. 117 


attracted the interest of the world even more, had it 
not been for one of his disciples. This was a young 
man from Sinope, on the Euxine, whom he did not 
take to at first sight; the son of a disreputable money- 
changer who had been sent to prison for defacing the 
coinage. Antisthenes ordered the lad away, but he 
paid no attention ; he beat him with his stick, but he 
never moved. He wanted ‘ wisdom’, and saw that 
Antisthenes had it to give. His aim in life was to do 
as his father had done, to ‘ deface the coinage ’, but on 
-a much larger scale. He would deface all the coinage 
current in the world. Every conventional stamp was 
false. ‘The men stamped as generals and kings; the 
things stamped as honour and wisdom and happiness 
and riches; all were base metal with lying super- 
scriptions. All must have the stamp defaced.’ 

This young man was Diogenes, afterwards the most 
famous of all the Cynics. He started by rejecting all 
stamps and superscriptions and holding that nothing 
but dreté, ‘worth’ or ‘ goodness’, was good. He 
rejected tradition. He rejected the current religion 
andthe rules and customs-of-temple worship. ‘True 
religion was-a thing of thespirit,.and needed no 
forms. He despised divination. He rejected civil life 
and marriage. He mocked at the general interest in 
the public games and the respect paid to birth, wealth, 
or reputation. Let man put aside these delusions and 
know himself. And for his defences let him arm him- 
self ‘against Fortune with courage, against Convention 

1 Td vouicpa tapayapatrew : see Life in Diog. Laert., fragments in 
Mullach, vol. ii, and the article in Pauly-Wissowa. 


118 THE GREAT SCHOOLS OF Il 


with Nature, against passion with Reason’. For 
Reason is ‘ the god within us ’. 

The salvation for man was to return to Nature, and 
Diogenes interpreted this return in the simplest and 
crudest way. He should live like the beasts, like 
primeval men, like barbarians. Were not the beasts 
blessed, peta Caovres like the Gods in Homer? And 
so, though in less perfection, were primitive men, not 
vexing their hearts with imaginary sins and conven- 
tions. ‘Travellers told of savages who married their 
sisters, or ate human flesh, or left their dead unburied. 
Why should they not, if they wished to? No wonder 
Zeus punished Prometheus the Fire-Bringer, who had 
brought all this progress upon us and left man civilized 
and more unhappy than any beast! He deserved his 
crag and his vulture! 

Diogenes took his mission with great earnestness. 
He was leader in a ‘ great battle against Pleasures and 
Desires’. He was ‘ the servant, the message-bearer, 
sent by Zeus’, ‘ the Setter-Free of mankind’ and the 
‘ Healer of passions ’. 

The life that he personally meant to live, and which 
he recommended to the wise, was what he called rép 
kuvixov Biov, ‘a dog’s life’, and he himself wished to 
be ‘cynic’ or ‘canine’. A dog was brave and faith- 
ful ; it had no bodily shame, no false theories, and few 
wants. A dog needed no clothes, no house, no city, 
no possessions, no titles; what he did need was 
‘virtue’, Areté, to catch his prey, to fight wild beasts, 
and to defend his master; and that he could provide 
for himself. Diogenes found, of course, that he needed 


II THe BOURTH: CEN BURY, in. c. 11g 


a little more than an ordinary dog; a blanket, a wallet 
or bowl to hold his food, and a staff ‘ to beat off dogs 
and bad men’. It was the regular uniform of a beggar. 
He asked for no house. There was a huge earthen 
pitcher—not a tub—outside the Temple of the Great 
Mother ; the sort of vessel that was used for burial in 
primitive Greece and which still had about it the 
associations of a coffin. Diogenes slept there when he 
wanted shelter, and it became the nearest approach 
to a home that he had. Like a dog he performed any 
bodily act without shame, when and where he chose. 
He obeyed no human laws because he recognized no 
city. He was Cosmopolites, Citizen of the Universe ; 
all men, and all beasts too, were his brothers... He lived 
preaching in the streets and begging his bread ; 
except that he did not ‘beg’, he ‘ commanded’. 
Other folk obeyed his commands because they were 
still slaves, while he ‘ had never been a slave again since 
Antisthenes set him free’. He had no fear, because 
there was nothing to take from him. Only slaves are 
afraid. 

Greece rang with stories of his mordant wit, and 
every bitter saying became fathered on Diogenes. 
Every one knew how Alexander the Great had come 
to see the famous beggar and, standing before him 
where he sat in the open air, had asked if there was 
any boon he could confer on him. ‘ Yes, move from 
between me and the sun.’ They knew the king’s 
saying, ‘ If I were not Alexander I would be Diogenes ’, 
and the polite answer ‘ If I were not Diogenes I would 


be Alexander’. The Master of the World and the 


120 THE GREAT SCHOOLS OF itl 


Rejector of the World met on an equality. People 
told too how the Cynic walked about with a lamp in 
the daytime searching, so he said, ‘ fora man’. They 
knew his scorn of the Mysteries with their doctrine of 
exclusive salvation ; was a thief to be in bliss because 
he was initiated, while Agesilaus and Epaminondas were 
in outer darkness? A few of the stories are more 
whimsical. A workman carrying a pole accidentally 
hit Diogenes and cried ‘ Look out!’ ‘ Why,’ said he, 
‘are you going to hit me again?’ 

He had rejected patriotism as he rejected culture. 
Yet he suffered as he saw Greece under the Mace- 
donians and Greek liberties disappearing. When his 
death was approaching some disciple asked his wishes 
about his burial ; ‘ Let the dogs and wolves have me,’ 
he said; ‘I should like to be of some use to my 
brothers when I die.’ When this request was refused 
his thoughts turned again to the Macedonian Wars ; 
‘Bury me face downwards; everything is soon going 
to be turned the other way up.’ 

He remains the permanent and unsurpassed type of 
one way of grappling with the horror of life. Fear 
nothing, desire nothing, possess nothing; and then 
Life with all its ingenuity of malice cannot disappoint 
you. If man cannot enter into life nor yet depart 
from it save through agony and filth, let him learn 
to endure the one and be indifferent to the other. 
The watchdog of Zeus on earth has to fulfil his special 
duty, to warn mankind of the truth and to set slaves 
free. Nothing else matters. 

The criticism of this solution is not that it is selfish. 


111 THE FOURTH CENTURY, s.c. 121 


It is not. The Cynic lives for the salvation of his fellow 
creatures. And it is worth remembering that before 
the Roman gladiatorial games were eventually stopped 
by the self-immolation of the monk Telemachus, two 
Cynic philosophers had thrown themselves into the 
arena in the same spirit. Its weakness lies in a false 
psychology, common to all the world at that time, 
which imagined that salvation or freedom consists in 
living utterly without desire or fear, that such a life is 
biologically possible, and that Diogenes lived it. To 
a subtler critic it is obvious that Diogenes was a man 
of very strong and successful ambitions, though his 
ambitions were different from those of most men. He 
solved the problem of his own life by following with 
all the force and courage of his genius a line of conduct 
which made him, next to Alexander, the most famous 
man in Greece. To be really without fear or desire 
would mean death, and to die is not to solve the riddle 
of living. 

The difference between the Cynic view of life and 
that of Plato’s Republic is interesting. Plato also 
rejected the most fundamental conventions of existing 
society, the accepted methods of government, the laws 
of property and of marriage, the traditional religion 
and even the poetry which was a second religion to the 
Greeks. But he rejected the existing culture only 
because he wanted it to be better. He condemned the 
concrete existing city in order to build a more perfect 
city, to proceed in infinite searching and longing 
towards the Idea of Good, the Sun of the spiritual 
universe. Diogenes rejected the civilization which he 

2960 Q 


L22 THE GREAT SCHOOLS OF ut 


saw, and admitted the reality of no other. His crude 
realistic attitude of mind had no use for Plato’s 
‘“Tdeas’. ‘I can see a table,’ he said; ‘I cannot 
see Tabularity’’ (rpamelérns). ‘I know Athens and 
Corinth and other cities, and can see that they are all 
bad. As for the Ideal Society, show it me and I will 
say what I think.’ 

In spite of its false psychology the Cynic conception 
of life had a great effect in Greece. It came almost as 
a revelation to both men and women ' and profoundly 
influenced all the Schools. Here indeed, it seemed, was 
a way to baffle Fortune and to make one’s own soul 
unafraid. What men wanted was 75 Oappetv ‘ to be of 
good cheer’; as we say now, to regain their morale 
after bewildering defeats. ‘The Cynic answer, after- 
wards corrected and humanized by the Stoics, was to 
look at life as a long and arduous campaign. ‘The loyal 
soldier does not trouble about his comfort or his 
rewards or his pleasures. He obeys his commander’s 
orders without fear or failing, whether they lead to 


1 There were women among the Cynics. ‘The doctrine also 
captured Metrocles’ sister, Hipparchia. She loved Crates, his words, 
and his way of life, and paid no attention to any of her suitors, however 
rich or highborn or handsome. Crates was everything to her. She 
threatened her parents that she would commit suicide unless she were 
given to him. ‘They asked Crates to try to change the girl’s mind, and 
he did all he could to no effect, till at last he put all his possessions on 
the floor and stood up in front of her. ‘ Here is your bridegroom ; 
there is his fortune ; now think!’ The girl made her choice, put on 
the beggar’s garb, and went her ways with Crates. She lived with him 
openly and went like him to beg food at dinners.’ Diog. Laert. 
vi. 96 ff. 


oitt THE FOURTH CENTURY, .s.c. 123 


easy victories or merely to wounds, captivity or death. 
Only Goodness is good, and for the soldier Goodness 
(dpery) is the doing of Duty. That is his true prize, 
which no external power can take away from him. 

But after all, what is Duty? Diogenes preached 
‘virtue’ and assumed that his way of life was ‘ virtue’. 
But was it really so? And, if so, on what evidence ? 
To live like a beast, to be indifferent to art, beauty, 
letters, science, philosophy, to the amenities of civic 
life, to all that raised Hellenic Man above the beast 
or the savage? How could this be the true end of 
man? ‘The Stoic School,- whose founder, Zeno, was 
a disciple of old Antisthenes, gradually built up a 
theory of moral life which has on the whole weathered 
the storms of time with great success. It largely 
dominated later antiquity by its imaginative and 
emotional power. It gave form to the aspirations of 
early Christianity. It lasts now as the nearest approach 
to an acceptable system of conduct for those who do 
not accept revelation, but still keep some faith in the 
Purpose of ‘Things. 

The problem is to combine the absolute value of that 
Goodness which, as we say, ‘ saves the soul’ with the 
relative values of the various good things that soothe 
or beautify life. For, if there is any value at all—I will 
not say in health and happiness, but in art, poetry, 
knowledge, refinement, public esteem, or human 
affection, and if their claims do clash, as in common 
opinion they sometimes do, with the demands of 
absolute sanctity, how is the balance to be struck? 
Are we to be content with the principle of accepting 


124 THE GREAT, SCHOOLS OF UII 


a little moral wrong for the sake of much material or 
artistic or intellectual advantage? ‘That is the rule 
which the practical world follows, though without 
talking about it; but the Stoics would have none of 
any such compromise. 

Zeno first, like Antisthenes, denied any value what- 
ever to these earthly things that are not virtue—to 
health or sickness, riches or poverty, beauty or ugliness, 
pain or pleasure ; who would ever mention them when 
the soul stood naked before God? All that would then 
matter, and consequently all that can ever matter, 
is the goodness of the man’s self, that is, of his free and 
living will. The Stoics improved on the military 
metaphor ; for to the soldier, after all, it does matter 
whether in his part of the field he wins or loses. Life 
is not like a battle but like a play, in which God has 
handed each man his part unread, and the good man 
proceeds to act it to the best of his power, not knowing 
what may happen in the last scene. He may become 
a crowned king, he may be a slave dying in torment. 
What matters it? The good actor can play either part. 
All that matters is that he shall act his best, accept the 
order of the Cosmos and obey the Purpose of the great 
Dramaturge. 

The answer seems absolute and unyielding, with no 
concession to the weakness of the flesh. Yet, in truth, 
it contains in itself the germ of a sublime practical 
compromise which makes Stoicism human. It accepts 
the Cosmos and it obeys the Purpose; therefore there 
is a Cosmos, and there is a purpose in the world. 
Stoicism, like much of ancient thought at this period, 


IIT THE FOURTH CENTURY, s.c. 125 


was permeated by the new discoveries of astronomy 
and their formation into a coherent scientific system, 
which remained unshaken till the days of Copernicus. 
The stars, which had always moved men’s wonder and 
even worship, were now seen and proved to be no 
wandering fires but parts of an immense and apparently 
eternal order. One star might differ from another star 
in glory, but they were all alike in their obedience to 
law. ‘They had their fixed courses, divine though they 
were, which had been laid down for them by a Being 
greater than they. The Order, or Cosmos, was a 
proven fact ; therefore, the Purpose was a proven fact ; 
and, though in its completeness inscrutable, it could at 
least in part be divined from the fact that all these 
varied and eternal splendours had for their centre our 
Earth and its ephemeral master. The Purpose, though 
it is not our Purpose, is especially concerned with us 
and circles round us. It is the purpose of a God who 
loves Man. 

Let us forget that this system of astronomy has been 
overthrown, and that we now know that Man is not 
the centre of the universe. Let us forget that the 
majestic order which reigns, or seems to reign, among 
the stars, is matched by a brutal conflict and a chaos 
of jarring purposes in the realms of those sciences which 
deal with life. If we can recover the imaginative 


1 e.g. the struggle for existence among animals and plants; the 
dAAnAopayia, or ‘mutual devouring’, of animals; and such points as 
the various advances in evolution which seem self-destructive. ‘Thus, 
Man has learnt to stand on two feet and use his hands; a great 
advantage but one which has led to numerous diseases. Again, 


126 THE GREAT SCHOOLS OF itl 


outlook of the generations which stretched from, say, 
Meton in the fifth century before Christ to Copernicus 
in the sixteenth after, we shall be able to understand 
the spiritual exaltation with which men like Zeno or 
Poseidonius regarded the world. 

We are part of an Order, a Cosmos, which we see to 
be infinitely above our comprehension but which we 
know to be an expression of love for Man; what can 

“we do but accept it, not with resignation but with 
enthusiasm, and offer to it with pride any sacrifice 
which it may demand of us. It is a glory to suffer for 
such an end. 

And there is more. For the Stars show only what 
may be called a stationary purpose, an Order which is 
and remains for ever. But in the rest of the world, we 
can see a moving Purpose. It is Phusis, the word which 
the Romans unfortunately translated ‘ Natura’, but 
which means ‘ Growing” or ‘ the way things grow ’— 
almost what we call Evolution. But to the Stoic it is 
a living and conscious evolution, a forethought or 
IIpdvora in the mind of God, what the Romans called 
providentia, guiding all things that grow in a direction 
which accords with the divine will. And the direction, 
the Stoic pointed out, was not towards mere happiness 
but towards Areté, or the perfection of each thing or 
each species after its kind. Phusis shapes the acorn to 
grow into the perfect oak, the blind puppy into the 
good hound; it makes the deer grow in swiftness to 


physiologists say that the increasing size of the human head, especially 
when combined with the diminishing size of the pelvis, tends to make 
normal birth impossible. 


111 THE FOURTH CENTURY, B.c. 127 


perform the function of a deer, and man grow in power 
and wisdom to perform the function of a man. Ifa 
man is an artist it is his function to produce beauty ; 
is he a governor, it 1s his function to produce a flourish- 
ing and virtuous city. True, the things that he pro- 
duces are but shadows and in themselves utterly 
valueless ; it matters not one straw whether the deer 
goes at ten miles an hour or twenty, whether the 
population of a city die this year of famine and sickness 
or twenty years hence of old age. But it belongs to the 
good governor to avert famine and to produce healthy 
conditions, as it belongs to the deer to run its best. 
So it is the part of a friend, if need arise, to give his 
comfort or his life for a friend; of a mother to love 
and defend her children ; though it is true that in the 
light of eternity these ‘ creaturely ’ affections shrivel 
into their native worthlessness. If the will of God is 
done, and done willingly, all is well. You may, if it 
brings you great suffering, feel the pain. You may 
even, through human weakness, weep or groan; that 
can be forgiven. “Eowfev pévroe pn oreva€éys, ‘ But in 
the centre of your being groan not!’ Accept the 
Cosmos. Will joyously that which God wills and make 
the eternal Purpose your own. 

I will say no more of this great body of teaching as 
I have dealt with it in a separate publication.’ But 
I would point out two special advantages of a psycho- 
logical kind which distinguish Stoicism from many 


1 The Stoic Philosophy (1915). See also Arnold’s Roman Stoicism 
(1911); Bevan’s Stoics and Sceptics (1913) ; and especially Stotcorum 
Veterum Fragmenta by von Arnim (1903-5). 


128 THE GREAT SCHOOLS OF IIT 


systems of philosophy. First, though it never con- 
sciously faced the psychological problem of instinct, it 
did sce clearly that man does not necessarily pursue 
what pleases him most, or what is most profitable to 
him, or even his ‘ good’. It saw that man can deter- 
mine his end, and may well choose pain in preference 
to pleasure. ‘This saved the school from a-great deal 
of that false schematization which besets most forms 
of rationalistic psychology. Secondly, it did build up 
a system of thought on which, both in good days and 
evil, a life can be lived which is not only saintly, but 
practically wise and human and beneficent. It did for 
practical purposes solve the problem of living, without 
despair and without grave, or at least without gross, 
illusion. 

The other great school of the fourth century, a school 
which, in the matter of ethics, may be called the only 
true rival of Stoicism, was also rooted in defeat. But 
it met defeat in a different spirit... Epicurus, son of 
Neocles, of the old Athenian clan of the Philaidae, was 
born on.a colony in Samos in 341 B.c. His father was 
evidently poor ; else he would hardly have left Athens 
to live on a colonial farm, nor have had to eke out his 
farming by teaching an elementary school. We do not 
know how much the small boy learned from his father. 
But for older students there was a famous school on the 


1 The chief authorities on Epicurus are Usener’s Epicurea, containing 
the Life from Diog. Laert., fragments and introduction: the papyrus 
fragments of Philodemus in Volumina Herculanensia; Diogenes of 
Oenoanda (text by William, Teubner, 1907); the commentaries on 
Lucretius (Munro, Giussani, &c.). 


111 THE FOURTH: CENTURY, 3. c. 129 


neighbouring island of Teos, where a certain Nausi- 
phanes taught the Ionian tradition of Mathematics and 
Physics as well as rhetoric and literary subjects. 
Epicurus went to this school when he was fourteen, and 
seems, among other things, to have imbibed the 
Atomic Theory of Democritus without realizing that 
it was anything peculiar. He felt afterwards as if his 
school-days had been merely a waste of time. At the 
age of eighteen he went to Athens, the centre of the 
philosophic world, but he only went, as Athenian 
citizens were in duty bound, to perform his year of 
military service as ephébus. Study was to come later. 
Whe next’-year,. however, 322,: Perdiccas| of ‘Uhraceé 
made an attack on Samos and drove out the Athenian 
colonists. Neocles had by then lived on his bit of land 
for thirty years, and was old to begin life again. The 
ruined family took refuge in Colophon, and there 
Epicurus joined them. ‘They were now too poor for 
the boy to go abroad to study philosophy. He could 
only make the best of a hard time and puzzle alone over 
the problems of life. 

Recent years have taught us that there are few forms 
of misery harder than that endured by a family of 
refugees, and it is not likely to have been easier in 
ancient conditions. Epicurus built up his philosophy, 
it would seem, while helping his parents and brothers 
through this bad time. The problem was how to make 
the life of their little colony tolerable, and he somehow 
solved it. It was not the kind of problem which 
Stoicism and the great religions specially set them- 
selves; it was at once too unpretending and too 

2960 R 


130 THE GREAT SCHOOLS OF ill 


practical. One can easily imagine the condition for 
which he had to prescribe. For one thing, the un- 
fortunate refugees all about him would torment 
themselves with unnecessary terrors. ‘The Thracians 
were pursuing them. ‘The Gods hated them; they 
must obviously have committed some offence or 
impiety. (It is always easy for disheartened men to 
discover in themselves some sin that deserves punish- 
ment.) It would surely be better to die at once; 
except that, with that sin upon them, they would only 
suffer more dreadfully beyond the grave! In their 
distress they jarred, doubtless, on one another’s nerves ; 
and mutual bitterness doubled their miseries. 

Epicurus is said to have had poor health, and the 
situation was one where even the best health would be 
sorely tried. But he had superhuman courage, and— 
what does not always go with such courage—a very 
affectionate and gentle nature. In later life all his 
three brothers were his devoted disciples—a_testi- 
monial accorded to few prophets or founders of 
religions. And he is the first man in the record of 
European history whose mother was an important 
element in his life. Some of his letters to her have been 
preserved, and show a touch of intimate affection which 
of course must have existed between human beings 
from the remotest times, but of which we possess no 
earlier record. And fragments of his letters to his 
friends strike the same note. 


1 Epicurus is the one philosopher who protests with real indignation 
against that inhuman superiority to natural sorrows which is so much 
prized by most of the ancient schools. ‘To him such ‘ apathy ’ argues 


II THECCOURTH CENTURYE Ss: c. 131 


His first discovery was that men torture themselves ° 
with unnecessary fears. He must teach them courage, 
Jappety aid Tov Dear, Pappetv ard dvOparrav, to fear no 
evil from either man or God. God is a blessed being ; 
and no blessed being either suffers evil or inflicts evil on 
others. And as for men, most of the evils you fear from 
them can be avoided by Justice; and if they do come, 
they can be borne. Death is like sleep, an unconscious 
state, nowise to be feared. Pain when it comes can be 
endured; it is the anticipation that makes men » 
miserable and saps their courage. The refugees were — 
forgotten by the world, and had no hope of any great 
change in their condition. Well, he argued, so much 
the better! Let them till the earth and love one 
another, and they would find that they had already in 
them that Natural Happiness which 1s man’s possession 
until he throws it away. And of all things that contri- 
bute to happiness the greatest is Affection, dudta. 

Like the Cynics and Stoics, he rejected the world and 
all its conventions and prizes, its desires and passions 
and futility. But where the Stoic and Cynic pro- 
claimed that in spite of all the pain and suffering of 
a wicked world, man can by the force of his own will be | 
virtuous, Epicurus brought the more surprising good 
news that man can after all be happy. ‘ 
either a hard heart or a morbid vanity (Fr. 120). His letters are full 
of affectionate expressions which rather shock the stern reserve of 
antique philosophy. He waits for one friend’s ‘ heavenly presence ’ 
(Fr. 165). He ‘ melts with a peculiar joy mingled with tears in remem- 
bering the last words’ of one who is dead (Fr. 186; cf. 213). He is 


enthusiastic about an act of kindness performed by another, who 
walked some five miles to help a barbarian prisoner (Fr. 194). 


132 THE GREAT SCHOOLS OF III 


But to make this good news credible he had to 
construct a system of thought. He had to answer the 
temple authorities and their adherents among the 
vulgar, who threatened his followers with the torments 
of Hades for their impiety. He had to answer the 
Stoics and Cynics, preaching that all is worthless 
except Areté; and the Sceptics, who dwelt on the 
fallibility of the senses, and the logical impossibility 
of knowledge. 

He met the last of Bie by the traditional Ionian 
doctrine of sense-impressions, ingeniously developed. 
We can, he argued, know the outer world, because our 
sense impressions are literally ‘ impressions ’ or stamps 
made by external objects upon our organs. To see, for 
instance, is to be struck by an infinitely tenuous stream 
of images, flowing from the object and directly imping- 
ing upon the retina. Such streams are flowing from 
all objects in every direction—an idea which seemed 
incredible until the modern discoveries about light, 
sound, and radiation. ‘Thus there is direct contact 
with reality, and consequently knowledge. Besides 
direct vision, however, we have ‘ anticipations’, or 
mpodywers, sometimes called ‘common conceptions’, 
e.g. the general conception which we have of a horse 
when we are not seeing one. ‘I’hese are merely the result 
of repeated acts of vision. A curious result of this 
doctrine was that all our ‘ anticipations * or ‘ common 
ideas’ are true; mistakes occur through some inter- 
pretation of our own which we add to the simple 
sensation. 

We can know the world. How then are we to under- 


11 THE FOURTH CENTURY, .s.c. 133 


stand it? Here again Epicurus found refuge in the 
old Ionian theory of Atoms and the Void, which is 
supposed to have originated with Democritus and 
Leucippus, a century before. But Epicurus seems to 
have worked out the Atomic Theory more in detail, 
as we have it expounded in Lucretius’ magnificent 
poem. In particular it was possibly he who first 
combined the Atomic Theory with hylozoism ; i.e. he 
conceived of the Atoms as possessing some rudimentary 
power of movement and therefore able to swerve 
slightly in their regular downward course. ‘That 
explains how they have become infinitely tangled and 
mingled, how plants and animals are alive, and how 
men have Free Will. It also enables Epicurus to build 


up a world without the assistance of a god. Heset man %/ 


free, as Lucretius says, from the ‘ burden of Religion ’, 
though his doctrine of the ‘ blessed Being’ which 
neither has pain nor gives pain, enables him to elude 
the dangerous accusation of atheism. He can leave 
people believing in all their traditional gods, including 
even, if so they wish, ‘the bearded Zeus and the 
helmed Athena ’ which they see in dreams and in their 
‘common ideas’, while at the same time having no 
fear of them. 

There remains the foolish fancy of the Cynics and 
Stoics that ‘ Areté’ is the only good. Of course, he 
answers, Areté is good ; but that is because it produces 
happy life, or blessedness or pleasure or whatever you 
callit. He used normally the word 7dov7x ‘ sweetness ’, 
and counted the Good as that which makes life sweet. 
He seems never to have entered into small disputes as 


134 THE GREAT SCHOOLS OF III 


te 


to the difference between ‘sweetness’, or ‘ pleasure’, 
and ‘ happiness’ and ‘ well-being ’ (jdo0v7, evdatpovia, 
eveoTo, KT.), though sometimes, instead of ‘sweetness’ 
he spoke of ‘ blessedness’ (yaxapidrys). Ultimately 
the dispute between him and the Stoics seems to resolve 
itself into a question whether the Good lies in mavyeuw 
or qovetv, in Experience or in Action; and average 
human beings seem generally to think that the Good 
for a conscious being must be something of which he is 
conscious. 

Thus the great system is built, simple, intelligible, 
dogmatic, and—as such systems go—remarkably water- 
tight. It enables man to be unafraid, and it helps him 
to be happy. The strange thing is that, although on 
more than one point it seems to anticipate most 
surprisingly the discoveries of modern science, it was 
accepted in a spirit more religious than scientific. As 
we can see from Lucretius it was taken almost as a 
revelation, from one who had saved mankind ; whose 
intellect had pierced beyond the ‘ flaming walls of 
Heaven’ and brought back to man the gospel of an 
intelligible universe.! 


' Lucretius, i. 62-79, actually speaks of the great atheist in language 
taken from the Saviour Religions (see below, p. 196) : 


When Man’s life upon earth in base dismay, 
Crushed by the burthen of Religion, lay, 

Whose face, from all the regions of the sky, 
Hung, glaring hate upon mortality, 

First one Greek man against her dared to raise 
His eyes, against her strive through all his days ; 
Him noise of Gods nor lightnings nor the roar 
Of raging heaven subdued, but pricked the more 


m THE FOURTH CENTURY, s.c. 135 


In 310 8B. c., when Epicurus was thirty-two, things 
had so far improved that he left Colophon and set up 
a school of philosophy in Mytilene, but soon moved to 
Lampsacus, on the Sea of Marmora, where he had 
friends. Disciples gathered about him. Among them 
were some of the leading men of the city, like Leonteus 
and Idomeneus. ‘The doctrine thrilled them and 
seemed to bring freedom with it. They felt that such 
a teacher must be set up in Athens, the home of the great 
philosophers. They bought by subscription a house 
and garden in Athens for 80 minae (about £320) ' and 
presented it to the Master. He crossed to Athens in 
306 and, though he four times revisited Lampsacus 
and has left letters addressed To Friends in Lampsacus, 
he lived in the famous Garden for the rest of his life. 

Friends from Lampsacus and elsewhere came and 
lived with him or near him. The Garden was not only 


His spirit’s valiance, till he longed the Gate 

To burst of this low prison of man’s fate. 

And thus the living ardour of his mind 
Conquered, and clove its way; he passed behind 
The world’s last flaming wall, and through the whole 
Of space uncharted ranged his mind and soul. 
Whence, conquering, he returned to make Man sce 
At last what can, what cannot, come to be; 

By what law to each Thing its power hath been 
Assigned, and what deep boundary set between ; 
Till underfoot is tamed Religion trod, 

And, by His victory, Man ascends to God. 

1 That is, 8,000 drachmae. Rents had risen violently in 314 and so 
presumably had land prices. Else one would say the Garden was about 
the value of a good farm. See Tarn in The Hellenistic Age (1923), 
p- 116. 


136 THE GREAT SCHOOLS OF it 


a philosophical school ; it was also a sort of retreat or 
religious community. There lived there not only 
philosophers like Métrod6rus, Colétes, Hermarchus, and 
others; there were slaves, like Mys, and free women, 
like Themista, the wife of Leonteus, to both of whom 
the Master, as the extant fragments testify, wrote 
letters of intimate friendship. And not only free 
women, but women with names that show that they 
were slaves, Leontion, Nikidion, Mammarion. They 
were hetairae; perhaps victims of war, like many of 
the unfortunate heroines in the New Comedy; free 
women from conquered cities, who had been sold in 
the slave market or reduced to misery as refugees, and 
to whom now the Garden afforded a true and spiritua 

refuge. For, almost as much as Diogenes, Epicurus had 
obliterated the stamp on the conventional currency. 
- 'The values of the world no longer held good after you 
had passed the wicket gate of the Garden, and spoken 
with the Deliverer. 

The Epicureans lived simply. They took neither 
flesh nor wine, and there is a letter extant, asking 
some one to send them a present of ‘ potted cheese’! as 
a special luxury. Their enemies, who were numerous 
and lively, make the obvious accusations about the 
hetairae, and cite an alleged letter of the Master to 
Leontion. ‘ Lord Paean, my dear little Leontion, your 
note fills me with such a bubble of excitement!’ ? 

1 supov KvOpidvov, Fr. 182. 

° Fr. 143. ILodv avag, pidov Acovrdpiov, otov KporoboptBov Apas 
avéerAnoas, avayvovtas gov TO émorédov. Fr. 121 (from an enemy) 
implies that the Hetairae were expected to reform when they entered 


the Garden. Cf. Fr. 62 ovvovoin dvyce piv oddérore, a&yarnrov 


de ci wy EBrawWe: cf. Fr. 574. 


HI THE FOURTH CENTURY, s.c. 137 


The problem of this letter well illustrates the difficulty 
of forming clear judgements about the details of 
ancient life. Probably the letter is a forgery: we are 
definitely informed that there was a collection of such 
forgeries, made in order to damage Epicurus. But, if 
genuine, would it have seemed to a fair-minded con- 
temporary a permissible or an impermissible letter for 
a philosopher to write? By modern standards it would 
be about the border-line. And again, suppose it is a 
definite love-letter, what means have we of deciding 
whether Epicurus—or for that matter Zeno or Plato 
or any unconventional philosopher of this period— 
would have thought it blameworthy, or would merely 
have called our attention to the legal difficulties of 
contracting marriage with one who had been a Hetaira, 
and asked us how we expect men and women to live. 
Curiously enough, we happen to have the recorded 
sayings of Epicurus himself: ‘The wise man will not 
fall in love’, and ‘ Physical union of the sexes never 
did good ; it is much if it does not do harm.’ 

This philosophy is often unjustly criticized. It is 
called selfish ; but that it is certainly not. It is always 
aiming at the deliverance of mankind * and it bases its 
happiness on duAta, Friendship or Affection, just as the 
early Christians based it on aya, a word no whit 
stronger than duAta, though it is conventionally trans- 
lated ‘ Love’. By this conception it becomes at once 
more human than the Stoa, to which, as to a Christian 
monk, human affection was merely a weakness of the 
flesh which might often conflict with the soul’s duty 


1 See p. 204 below on Diogenes of Oenoanda. 
2960 Ss 


138 THE GREAT SCHOOLS OF iit 


towards God. Epicurus passionately protested against 
this unnatural ‘ apathy’. It was also human in that 
it recognized degrees of good or bad, of virtue or error. 
To the Stoic that which was not right was wrong. 
A calculator who says that seven sevens make forty- 
eight is just as wrong as one who says they make a 
thousand, and a sailor one inch below the surface of the 
water drowns just as surely as one who is a furlong deep. 
_ Just so in human life, wrong is wrong, falsehood is false- 
hood, and to talk of degrees is childish. Epicureanism 
had an easy and natural answer to these arguments, 
since pleasure and pain obviously admit of degrees." 

The school is blamed also for pursuing pleasure, on 
the ground that the direct pursuit of pleasure is self- 
defeating. But Epicurus never makes that mistake. 
He says that pleasure, or ‘ sweetness of life’, is the 
good ; but he never counsels the direct pursuit of it. 
Quite the reverse. He says that if you conquer your 
desires and fears, and live simply and love those about 
you, the natural sweetness of life will reveal itself. 

A truer criticism is one which appears dimly in 
Plutarch and Cicero.? There is a strange shadow of 
sadness hanging over this wise and kindly faith, which 
proceeds from the essential distrust of life that lies at its 
heart. The best that Epicurus has really to say of the 
world is that if you are very wise and do not attract 
its notice—Adfe Brooas—it will not hurt you. It is 


1 Pleasures and pains may be greater or less, but the complete 
‘removal of pain and fear’ is a perfect end, not to be surpassed. 
Fr. 408-48, Ep. 111. 129-31. 

° e.g. Plut. Ne swaviter quidem vivi, esp. chap. 17 (p. 1098 p). 


a 


II THE FOURTH CENTURY, 3.c. 139 


a philosophy not of conquest but of escape. ‘This was 
a weakness from which few of the fourth-century 
thinkers completely escaped. ‘To aim at what we 
should call positive happiness was, to the Epicureans, 
only to court disappointment ; better make it your aim 
to live without strong passion or desire, without high 
hopes or ambitions. Their professed ideals—zavrés 
Tov ahyovvTos vmEeEaiperis, arapaia, evpoua, ‘the re- 
moval of all active suffering’, ‘ undisturbedness’, ‘a 
smooth flow ’—seem to result in rather a low tension, 
in a life that is only half alive. We know that, as 
a matter of fact, this was not so. The Epicureans felt 
their doctrine to bring not mere comfort but inspiration 
and blessedness. The young Colotes, on first hearing 
the master speak, fell on his knees with tears and hailed 
him as a god.t. We may compare the rapturous phrases 
of Lucretius. What can be the explanation of this? 
Perhaps it is that a deep distrust of the world pro- 
duces its own inward reaction, as starving men dream 
of rich banquets, and persecuted sects have apocalyptic 
visions of paradise. ‘The hopes and desires that are 
starved of their natural sustenance project themselves 
on to some plane of the imagination. The martyr, 
even the most heretical martyr, sees the vision of his 
crown in the skies, the lover sees in obvious defects only 
rare and esoteric beauties. Epicurus avoided sedulously 
the transcendental optimism of the Stoics. He avoided 
mysticism, avoided allegory, avoided faith; he tried 
to set the feet of his philosophy on solid ground. He 


1 Cf. Fr. 141 when Epicurus writes to Colotes: ‘Think of me as 
immortal, and go your ways as immortal too.’ 


140 THE GREAT SCHOOLS OF III 


can make a strong case for the probable happiness of 
a man of kindly affections and few desires, who asks 
little from the outside world. But after all it is only 
probable ; misfortunes and miseries may come to any 
man. ‘Most of the evils you fear are false,’ he 
answers, still reasonably. ‘Death does not hurt. 
Poverty need never make a man less happy.’ And 
actual pain? ‘ Yes, pain may come. But you can 
endure it. Intense pains are brief; long-drawn pains 
are not excruciating; or seldom so.’ Is that common- 
sense comfort not enough? ‘The doctrine becomes 
more intense both in its promises and its de- 
mands. If intense suffering comes, he enjoins, turn 
away your mind and conquer the pain by the ‘ sweet- 
ness’ of memory. ‘There are in every wise man’s life 
moments of intense beauty and delight; if he has 
strength of mind he will call them back to him at will 
and live in the blessedness of the past, not in the mere 
dull agony of the moment. Nay, can he not actually 
enjoy the intellectual interest of this or that pang? 
Has he not that within him which can make the 
quality of its own life? On hearing of the death of 
a friend he will call back the sweetness of that friend’s 
converse ; in the burning Bull of Phalaris he will think 
his thoughts and be glad. Illusion, the old Siren with 
whom man cannot live in peace, nor yet without her, 
has crept back unseen to the centre of the citadel. 
It was Epicurus, and not a Stoic or Cynic, who asserts 
that a Wise Man will be happy on the rack.} 


Strangely obliging, ironic Fortune gave to him also 
1/Fr 601s cf, §98 i, 





III BEB O Wiebe CHINE CRW ees Cc: 141 


a chance of testing of his own doctrine. ‘There is 
extant a letter written on his death-bed. ‘I write to 
you on this blissful day which is the last of my life. 
The obstruction of my bladder and internal pains have 
reached the extreme point, but there is marshalled 
against them the delight of my mind in thinking over 
our talks together. ‘Take care of the children of 
Metrodorus in a way worthy of your life-long devotion 
to me and to philosophy.’? At least his courage, and 
his kindness, did not fail. 

Epicureanism had certainly its sublime side ; and 
from this very sublimity perhaps arose the ee 
flaw in the system, regarded as a rational philosophy. 
It was accepted too much as a Revelation, too little as 
a mere step in the search for truth. It was based no 
doubt on careful and even profound scientific studies, 
and was expounded by the master in a vast array of 
volumes. But the result so attained was considered 
sufficient. Further research was not encouraged. 
Heterodoxy was condemned as something almost 
approaching ‘ parricide’.2 The pursuit of ‘ needless 
knowledge’ was deliberately frowned upon.* When 

Beret aor.) cf) 177; 

2 “ol rovTous avTLypaovres ov TavY TL paKpay THS TOV TaTpadoLov 
Katadikys adeorykacw ’, Fr. 49. Usener, from Philodemus, De Rhet. 
This may be only a playful reference to Plato’s phrase about being 
a watpaXoias of his father, Parmenides, Soph., p. 241 D. 

3 Epicurus congratulated himself (erroneously) that he came to 
Philosophy ka6apos mdons matdeias, ‘undefiled by education’. Cf. 
Fr. 163 to Pythocles, wadelav d¢ macav, pakdpie, pevye TO AkAaTLOV 


dpdevos, ‘From education in every shape, my son, spread sail and 


fly |? 


142 THE GREAT SCHOOLS OF IIL 


other philosophers were working out calculations about 
the size of the Sun and the commensurability of the 
sun-cycle and the moon-cycle, Epicurus contemptuously 
remarked that the Sun was probably about as big as it 
looked, or perhaps smaller; since fires at a distance 
generally look bigger than they are. The various 
theories of learned men were all possible but none 
certain. And as for the.cycles, how did any one know 
that there was not a new sun shot off and extinguished 
every day? + It is not surprising to find that none of 
the great discoveries of the Hellenistic Age were due 
to the Epicurean school. Lucretius, writing 250 years 
later, appears to vary hardly in any detail from the 
doctrines of the Master, and Diogenes of Oenoanda, 
500 years later, actually repeats his letters and sayings 
word for word. 

It is sad, this. It is un-Hellenic; it is a clear 
symptom of decadence from the free intellectual move- 
ment and the high hopes which had made the fifth 
century glorious. -Only in one great school does the 
true Hellenic Sophrosyné continue flourishing, a school 
whose modesty of pretension and quietness of language 
form a curious contrast with the rapt ecstasies of Stoic 
and Cynic and even, as we have seen, of Epicurean, 
just as its immense richness of scientific achievement 
contrasts with their comparative sterility. “The Porch 
and the Garden offered new religions to raise from the 
dust men and women whose spirits were broken ; 
_ Aristotle in his Open Walk, or Peripatos, brought 
philosophy and science and literature to guide the feet 


1 Fr. 343-6. 


— 


a ed 


— = 


III Lit FOURTH’ CENTURY) 3: c. 143 


and interest the minds of those who still saw life 
steadily and tried their best to see it whole. 

Aristotle was not lacking in religious insight and 
imagination, as he certainly was not without profound 
influence on the future history of religion. | His com- 
plete rejection of mythology and of anthropomorphism ; ‘ 
his resolute attempt to combine religion and science, © 
not by sacrificing one to the other but by building the © 
highest spiritual aspirations on ascertained truth and _ 
the probable conclusions to which it pointed; his 
splendid imaginative conception of the Divine Being 
or First Cause as unmoved itself while moving all the 
universe ‘as the beloved moves the lover’; all these 
are high services to religious speculation, and justify 
the position he held, even when known only through 
a distorting Arabic translation, in medieval Christianity. | 
If he had not written his other books he might well be © 
famous now as a great religious teacher. But his 
theology is dwarfed by the magnificence and mass of 
his other work. And as a philosopher and man of 
science he does not belong to our present subject. 

He_is only mentioned here..as..astandard. of. that 
characteristic quality in Hellenism from which the 
rest of this book records a downfall. One variant of 
a well-known story tells how a certain philosopher, 
after frequenting the Peripatetic School, went to hear 
Chrysippus, the Stoic, and was transfixed. ‘It was 
like turning from men to Gods.’ It was really turning 
from Greeks to Semites, from philosophy to religion, 
from a school of very sober professions and high per- 
formance to one whose professions dazzled the reason. 


144 THE GREAT SCHOOLS OF a 


‘Come unto me,’ cried the Stoic, ‘all ye who are in 
storm or delusion; I will show you the truth and the 
world will never grieve you more.’ 

Aristotle matle no such profession. He merely 
thought and worked and taught better than other men. 
Aristotle is always surprising us not merely by the 
immense volume of clear thinking and co-ordinated 
knowledge of which he. was master, but by the steady 
Séphrosyné of his temper. Son of the court physician 
of Philip, tutor for some years to Alexander the Great, 
he never throughout his extant writings utters one 
syllable of flattery to his royal and world-conquering 
employers; nor yet one syllable which suggests a 
grievance. He saw, at close quarters and from the 
winning side, the conquest of the Greek city states by 
the Macedonian ethnos or nation; but he judges dis- 
passionately that the city is the higher social form. 

It seems characteristic that in his will, which is 
extant, after providing a dowry for his widow, Herpyl- 
lis, to facilitate her getting a second husband, and 
thanking her for her goodness to him, he directs that 
his bones are to be laid in the same grave with those of 
his first wife, Pythias, whom he had rescued from 
robbers more than twenty years before.’ 

Other philosophers disliked him because he wore no 

1 Pythias was the niece, or ward, of Aristotle’s friend, Hermias, an 
extraordinary man who rose from slavery to be first a free man and 
a philosopher, and later Prince or ‘ Dynast’ of Assos and Atarneus. 
In the end he was treacherously entrapped by the Persian a 
Mentor, and crucified by the king. Aristotle’s ‘Ode to Virtue’ 


addressed to him. ‘To his second wife, Herpyllis, Aristotle was only 
united by a civil marriage like the Roman usus. 


III VEE POWRTE, CENTURY Ss! c: 145 


long beard, dressed neatly and had good normal 
manners, and they despised his philosophy for very 
similar reasons. It was a school which took the 
existing world and tried to understand it instead of 
inventing some g some intense ¢ ecstatic doctrine which should 
transform it or reduce it to nothingness. 

It possessed no Open Sesame to unlock the prison of 
mankind; yet it is not haunted by that Ozmégé of 
Kynoskephalai. While armies sweep Greece this way 
and that, while the old gods are vanquished and the 
cities lose their freedom and their meaning, the 
Peripatetics instead of passionately saving souls dili- 
gently pursued knowledge, and in generation after 
generation produced scientific results which put all 
their rivals into the shade.t In mathematics, astro- 
nomy, physics, botany, zoology, and biology, as well 
as the human sciences of literature and history, the 
Hellenistic Age was one of the most creative known to 
our record. And it is not only that among the savants 
responsible for these advances the proportion of 
Peripatetics is overwhelming; one may also notice 
that in this school alone it is assumed as natural that 
further research will take place and will probably 
correct as well as increase our knowledge, and that, 
when such corrections or differences of opinion do take 
place, there is no cry raised of Heresy. 

It is the old difference between Philosophy and 
Religion, between the search of the intellect for truth 
and the cry of the heart for salvation. As the interest 
in truth for its own sake gradually abated in the ancient 








1 See note on Dicaearchus at end of chapter, 
2960 T 


hs 


146 THE GREAT SCHOOLS OF III 


world, the works of Aristotle might still find com-. 
mentators, but his example was forgotten and his 
influence confined to a small circle. The Porch and the 
Garden, for the most part, divided between them the 
allegiance of thoughtful men. Both systems had begun 
in days of discomfiture, and aimed originally more at 
providing a refuge for the soul than at ordering the 
course of society. But after the turmoil of the fourth 
century had subsided, when governments began again 
to approach more nearly to peace and consequently to 
justice, and public life once more to be attractive to 
decent men, both philosophies showed themselves 
adaptable to the needs of prosperity as well as adversity. 
Many kings and great Roman governors professed 


/ Stoicism. It held before them the ideal of universal 
| Brotherhood, and of duty to the ‘Great Society of 
| Godsand-Men’ ; it enabled them to work, indifferent 


to mere pain and pleasure, as servants of the divine 
purpose and ‘ fellow-workers with God ’ in building up 


\. a human Cosmos within the eternal Cosmos. It is 


perhaps at first sight strange that many kings and 
governors also followed Epicurus. Yet after all the 
work of a public man is not hindered by a slight irony 
as to the value of worldly greatness and a conviction 
that a dinner of bread and water with love to season 
it ‘is better than all the crowns of the Greeks’. To 
hate cruelty and superstition, to avoid passion and 
luxury, to regard human ‘ pleasure’ or ‘ sweetness of 
life’ as the goal to be aimed at, and ‘ friendship’ or 
“kindliness ’ as the principal element in that pleasure, 
are by no means doctrines incompatible with wise and 


Ill THE FOURTH CENTURY)" 8. c. 147 


effective administration. Both systems were good and 
both in a way complementary one to another. They 
still divide between them the practical philosophy of 
western mankind. At times to most of us it seems as 
though nothing in life had value except to do right and 
to fear not ; at others that the only true aim is to make 
mankind happy. At times man’s best hope seems to 
lie in that part of him which is prepared to defy or 
condemn the world of fact if it diverges from the ideal ; 
in that intensity of reverence which will accept many 
impossibilities rather than ever reject a holy thing; 
above all in that uncompromising moral sensitiveness 
to which not merely the corruptions of society but the 
fundamental and necessary facts of animal existence 
seem both nauseous and wicked, links and chains in 
a system which can never be the true home of the 
human spirit. At other times men feel the need to 
adapt their beliefs and actions to the world as it is ; 
to brush themselves free from cobwebs ; to face plain 
facts with common sense and as much kindliness as life 
permits, meeting the ordinary needs of a perishable 
and imperfect species without illusion and without 
make-believe. At one time we are Stoics, at another 
Epicureans. 

But amid their differences there is one faith which 
was held by both schools in common. It is the great 
characteristic faith of the ancient world, revealing 
itself in many Sm guises and seldom fully intelli- 


poemnneen 


\of the inward life over things « s external.” WUhese men 
really believe 4t wisdom is more precious than 


148 THE GREAT SCHOOLS OF III 


jewels, that poverty and ill health are things of no 
import, that the good man is happy whatever befall 
him, and all the rest. And in generation after genera- 
tion many of the ablest men, and women also, acted 
upon the belief. They lived by free choice lives whose 
simplicity and privation would horrify a modern 
labourer, and the world about them seems to have 
respected rather than despised their poverty. To the 
Middle Age, with its monks and mendicants expectant 
of reward in heaven, such an attitude, except for its 
disinterestedness, would be easily understood. ‘To 
some eastern nations, with their cults of asceticism and 
contemplation, the same doctrines have appealed 
almost like a physical passion or a dangerous drug 
running riot in their veins. But modern western man 
cannot believe them, nor believe seriously that others 
believe them. On us the power of the material world 
has, through our very mastery of it and the dependence 
which results from that mastery, both inwardly and 
outwardly increased its hold. Capta ferum victorem 
cepit. We have taken possession of it, and now we 
cannot move without it. 

The material element in modern life is far greater 
than in ancient; but it does not follow that the 
spiritual element is correspondingly less. No doubt 
it is true that a naval officer in a conning-tower in 
a modern battle does not need less courage and 
character than a naked savage who meets his enemy 
with a stick and a spear. Yet probably in the first case 
the battle is mainly decided by the weight and accuracy 
of the guns, in the second by the qualities of the 


11 THE FOURTH CENTURY, 8.c. 149 


fighter. Consequently the modern world thinks more 
incessantly and anxiously about the guns, that is, about 
money and mechanism; the ancient devotes its 
thought more to human character and duty. And it is 
curious to observe how, in general, each tries to remedy 
what is wrong with the world by the method that is 
habitually in its thoughts. Speaking broadly, apart 
from certain religious movements, the enlightened 
modern reformer, if confronted with some ordinary 
complex of misery and wickedness, instinctively 
proposes to cure it by higher wages, better food, more 
comfort and leisure ; to make people comfortable and 
trust to their becoming good. The typical ancient 
reformer would appeal to us to care for none of those 
things (since riches notoriously do not make men 
virtuous), but with all our powers to pursue wisdom 
or righteousness and the life of the spirit ; to be good 
men, as we can be if we will, and to know that all else 
will follow. 

This is one of the regions in which the ancients might 
have learned much from us, and in which we still have 
much to learn from them, if once we can shake off our 
temporal obsessions and listen. 


NOTE 


As an example it is worth noticing, even in a bare catalogue, the 
work done by one of Aristotle’s own pupils, a Peripatetic of the second 
rank, Dicaearchus of Messene. His floruit is given as 310 B.c. Dorian 
by birth, when Theophrastus was made head of the school he retired 
to the Peloponnese, and shows a certain prejudice against Athens. 

One of the discoveries of the time was biography. And, by a 


150 THE GREAT SCHOOLS OF III 


brilliant stroke of imagination Dicaearchus termed one of his books 
Bios “EAAd8dos, The Life of Hellas. He saw civilization as the biography 
of the world. First, the Age of Cronos, when man as a simple savage 
made no effort after higher things; next, the ancient river-civilizations 
of the orient ; third, the Hellenic system. Among his scanty fragments 
we find notes on such ideas as rdrpa, pparpia, vA, as Greek institu- 
tions. The Life of Hellas was much used by late writers. It formed 
the model for another Bios “EAAddos by a certain Jason, and for 
Varro’s Vita Popult Romant. | 

Then, like his great master, Dicaearchus made studies of the Consti- 
tutions of various states (e.g. Pellene, Athens, and Corinth); his 
treatise on the Constitution of Sparta was read aloud annually in that 
city by order of the Ephors. It was evidently appreciative. 

A more speculative work was his Tripoliticus, arguing that the best 
constitution ought to be compounded of the three species, monarchic, 
aristocratic, and democratic, asin Sparta. Only then would it be sure 
to last. Polybius accepted the principle of the Mixed Constitution, 
but found his ideal in the constitution of Rome, which later history 
was to prove so violently unstable. Cicero, De Republica, takes the 
same line (Polyb. vi. 2-10; Cic. De Rep. i. 45; i1. 65). Dicaearchus 
treated of similar political subjects in his public addresses at Olympia 
and at the Panathenaea. 

We hear more about his work on the history of literature, though his 
generation was almost the first to realize that such a subject had any 
existence. He wrote Lives of Philosophers—a subject hitherto not 
considered worth recording—giving the biographical facts followed 
by philosophic and aesthetic criticism. We hear, for example, of 
his life of Plato; of Pythagoras (in which he laid emphasis on the 
philosopher’s practical work), of Xenophanes, and of the Seven 
Wise Men. 

He also wrote Lives of Poets. We hear of books on Alcaeus and on 
Homer, in which latter he is said to have made the startling remark 
that the poems ‘ should be pronounced in the Aeolic dialect’. What- 
ever this remark exactly meant, and we cannot tell without the context, 
it seems an extraordinary anticipation of modern philological dis- 
- coveries. He wrote on the Hypotheses—i.e. the subject matter—of 
Sophocles and Euripides; also on Musical Contests, wept Movoixdv 


ur THE FOURTH CENTURY, 3.c. 151 


ayovev, carrying further Aristotle’s own collection of the Didascaliae, 
or official notices of the production of Tragediesin Athens, The book 
dealt both with dates and with customs; it told how Skolia were 
sung, with a laurel or myrtle twig in the hand, how Sophocles intro- 
duced a third actor, and the like. 

In philosophy proper he wrote On the Soul, wepi wuyys. His first 
book, the Corznthtacus, proved that the Soul was a ‘ harmony’ or 
‘right blending ’ of the four elements, and was identical with the force 
of the living body. The second, the Lesbiacus, drew the conclusion 
that, if a compound, it was destructible. (Hence a great controversy 
with his master.) 

He wrote zepi POopas avOpurwy, on the Perishing of Mankind ; i.e. 
on the way in which large masses of men have perished off the earth, 
through famine, pestilence, wild beasts, war, and the like. He decides 
that Man’s most destructive enemy is Man. (The subject may have 
been suggested to him by a fine imaginative passage in Aristotle’s 
Meteorology (i. 14, 7) dealing with the vast changes that have taken 
place on the earth’s surface and the unrecorded perishings of races and 
communities.) 

He wrote a treatise against Divination, and a (satirical ?) Descent to 
the Cave of Trophonius. He seems, however, to have allowed some 
importance to dreams and to the phenomena of ‘ possession ’. 

And, with all this, we have not touched on his greatest work, which 
was in the sphere of geography. He wrote a Ilepiodos ys, a fourney 
Round the Earth, accompanied with a map. He used for this map the 
greatly increased stores of knowledge gained by the Macedonian 
expeditions over all Asia as far as the Ganges. He also seems to have 
devised the method of denoting the position of a place by means of 
two co-ordinates, the method soon after developed by Eratosthenes 
into Latitude and Longitude. He attempted calculations of the 
measurements of large geographical distances, for which of course 
both his data and his instruments were inadequate. Nevertheless his 
measurements remained a well-known standard; we find them quoted 
and criticized by Strabo and Polybius. And, lastly, he published 
Measurements of the Heights of Mountains 1n the Peloponnese ; but the 
title seems to have been unduly modest, for we find in the fragments 
statements about mountains far outside that area; about Pelion and 


152 THE GREAT SCHOOLS Ill 


Olympus in Thessaly and of Atabyrion in Rhodes. He had a sub- 
vention, Pliny tells us (N. H. ii. 162, ‘regum cura permensus montes ’), 
from the king of Macedon, probably either Cassander or, as one would 
like to believe, the philosophic Antigonus Gonatas. And he calculated 
the heights, so we are told, by trigonometry, using the dlomrpa, an 
instrument of hollow reeds without lenses which served for his primitive 
theodolite. It is an extraordinary record, and illustrates the true 
Peripatetic spirit. 


IV 


THE FAILURE OF NERVE 


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IV 
THE FAILURE OF NERVE 


Any one who turns from the great writers of classical 
Athens, say Sophocles or Aristotle, to those of the 
Christian era must be conscious of a great difference 
in tone. There is a change in the whole relation of 
the writer to the world about him. The new quality 
is not specifically Christian : it is just as marked in the 
Gnostics and Mithras-worshippers as in the Gospels 
and the Apocalypse, in Julian and Plotinus as in 
Gregory and Jerome. It is hard to describe. It is a 
rise of asceticism, of mysticism, in a sense, of pessimism ; 
a loss of self-confidence, of hope in this life and of faith 
in normal human effort ; a despair of patient inquiry, 
a cry for infallible revelation ; an indifference to the 
welfare of the state, a conversion of the soul to God. 
It is an atmosphere in which the aim of the good man 
is not so much to live justly, to help the society to 
which he belongs and enjoy the esteem of his fellow 
creatures ; but rather, by means of a burning faith, by 
contempt for the world and its standards, by ecstasy, 
suffering, and martyrdom, to be granted pardon for 
his unspeakable unworthiness, his immeasurable sins. 
There is an intensifying of certain spiritual emotions ; 
an increase of sensitiveness, a failure of nerve. 

Now this antithesis is often exaggerated by the 


156 THE FAILURE OF NERVE IV 


admirers of one side or the other. A hundred people 
write as if Sophocles had no mysticism and practically 
speaking no conscience. Half a dozen retort as if 
St. Paul had no public spirit and no common sense. 
I have protested often against this exaggeration ; but, 
stated reasonably, as a change of proportion and not 
a creation of new hearts, the antithesis is certainly 
based on fact. The historical reasons for it are sug- 
gested above, in the first of these essays. 

My description of this complicated change is, 
of course, inadequate, but not, I hope, one-sided. 
I do not depreciate the religions that followed on 
this movement by describing the movement itself as 
a ‘failure of nerve’. Mankind has not yet decided 
which of two opposite methods leads to the fuller and 
deeper knowledge of the world: the patient and 
sympathetic study of the good citizen who lives in it, 
or the ecstatic vision of the saint who rejects it. But 
probably most Christians are inclined to believe that 
without some failure and sense of failure, without a 
contrite heart and conviction of sin, man can hardly 
attain the religious life. I can imagine an historian of 
this temper believing that the period we are about 
to discuss was a necessary softening of human pride, 
a Praeparatio Evangelica." 

1 Mr. Marett has pointed out that this conception has its roots 
deep in primitive human nature: The Birth of Humility, Oxford, 1910, 
p. 17. ‘It would, perhaps, be fanciful to say that man tends to run 
away from the sacred as uncanny, to cower before it as secret, and to 
prostrate himself before it as tabu. On the other hand, it seems plain 


that to these three negative qualities of the sacred taken together 
there corresponds on the part of man a certain negative attitude of 


IV THE FAILURE OF NERVE 157 


J am concerned in this paper with the lower country 
lying between two great ranges. ‘The one range is 
Greek Philosophy, culminating in Plato, Aristotle, the 
Porch, and the Garden; the other is Christianity, 
culminating in St. Paul and his successors. ‘The one 
is the work of Hellas, using some few foreign elements ; 
the second is the work of Hellenistic culture on a 
Hebrew stock. The books of Christianity are Greek, 
the philosophical background is Hellenistic, the result 
of the interplay, in the free atmosphere of Greek 
philosophy, of religious ideas derived from Egypt, 
Anatolia, Syria, and Babylon. The preaching is 
catried on in Greek among the Greek-speaking work- 
men of the great manufacturing and commercial cities. 
The first preachers are Jews: the central scene is 
set in Jerusalem. I wish in this essay to indicate how 


mind. Psychologists class the feelings bound up with flight, cowering, 
and prostration under the common head of “ asthenic emotion”, In 
plain English they are all forms of heart-sinking, of feeling unstrung. 
This general type of innate disposition, would seem to be the psycho- 
logical basis of Humility. ‘Taken in its social setting, the emotion will, 
of course, show endless shades of complexity ; for it will be excited, 
and again will find practical expression, in all sorts of ways. Under 
these varying conditions, however, it is reasonable to suppose that 
what Mr. McDougall would call the “ central part ”’ of the experience 
remains very much the same. In face of the sacred the normal man is 
visited by a heart-sinking, a wave of asthenic emotion.’ Mr. Marett 
continues: ‘ If that were all, however, Religion would be a matter of 
pure fear. Butitis not all. There is yet the positive side of the sacred 
to be taken into account.’ It is worth remarking also that Schleier- 
macher (1767-1834) placed the essence of religion in the feeling of 
absolute dependence without attempting to define the object towards 
which it was directed. 


158 THE FAILURE OF NERVE IV 


‘a period of religious history, which seems broken, is 
really continuous, and to trace the lie of the main 
valleys which lead from the one range to the other, 
through a large and imperfectly explored territory. 
The territory in question is the so-called Hellenistic 
Age, the period during which the Schools of Greece 
were ‘ hellenizing’ the world. It is a time of great 
enlightenment, of vigorous propaganda, of high impor- — 
tance to history. It is a time full of great names: in 
one school of philosophy alone we have Zeno, Cleanthes, ~ 
Chrysippus, Panaetius, Posidonius. Yet, curiously 
enough, it is represented in our tradition by something 
very like a mere void. There are practically no com- 
plete books preserved, only fragments and indirect 
quotations. Consequently in the search for informa- 
tion about this age we must throw our nets wide. 
Beside books and inscriptions of the Hellenistic period 
_ proper I have drawn on Cicero, Pliny, Seneca, and the 
like for evidence about their teachers and masters. 
I have used many Christian and Gnostic documents 
\ and works like the Corpus of Hermetic writings and 
the Mithras Liturgy. Among modern writers I must 
acknowledge a special debt to the researches of Diete- 
rich, Cumont, Bousset, Wendland, and Reitzenstein. 
The Hellenistic Age seems at first sight to have 
entered on an inheritance such as our speculative 
Anarchists sometimes long for, a tabula rasa, on which 
a new and highly gifted generation of thinkers might 
write clean and certain the book of their discoveries 
about life—what Herodotus would call their ‘ Historié’, 


IV THE FAILURE OF NERVE 159 


For, as we have seen in the last essay, it is clear that by 
the time of Plato the traditional religion of the Greek 
states was, if taken at its face value, a bankrupt concern. 
There was hardly one aspect in which it could bear 
criticism ; and in the kind of test that chiefly matters, 
the satisfaction of men’s ethical requirements and 
aspirations, it was if anything weaker than elsewhere. 
Now a religious belief that is scientifically preposterous 
may still have a long and comfortable life before it. 
Any worshipper can suspend the scientific part of his 
mind while worshipping. But a religious belief that 
is morally contemptible is in serious danger, because 
when the religious emotions surge up the moral 
emotions are not far away. And the clash cannot be 
hidden. 

This collapse of the traditional religion of Greece 
might not have mattered so much if the form of Greek 
social life had remained. If a good Greek had his 
Polis, he had an adequate substitute in most respects 
for any mythological gods. But the Polis too, as we 
have seen in the last essay, fell with the rise of Macedon. | 
It fell, perhaps, not from any special spiritual fault of 
its own ; it had few faults except its fatal narrowness ; 
but simply because there now existed another social 
whole, which, whether higher or lower in civilization, 
was at any rate utterly superior in brute force and in 
money. Devotion to the Polis lost its reality when the 
Polis, with all that it represented of rights and laws and 
ideals of Life, lay at the mercy of a military despot, who 
might, of course, be a hero, but might equally well be 
a vulgar sot or a corrupt adventurer. 


160 THE FAILURE OF NERVE IV 


What the succeeding ages built upon the ruins of the 
Polis is not our immediate concern. In the realm of 
thought, on the whole, the Polis triumphed. Aristotle 
based his social theory on the Polis, not the nation. 
Dicaearchus, Didymus, and Posidonius followed him, 
and we still use his language. Rome herself was a 
Polis, as well as an Empire. And Professor Haverfield 
has pointed out that a City has more chance of taking 
in the whole world to its freedoms and privileges than 
a Nation has of making men of alien birth its com- 
patriots. A Jew of ‘Tarsus could easily be granted the 
civic rights of Rome: he could never have been 
made an Italian or a Frenchman. The Stoic ideal 
of the World as ‘ one great City of Gods and Men’ 
has not been surpassed by any ideal based on the Nation. 

What we have to consider is the general. trend of 
religious thought from, say, the Peripatetics to the 
Gnostics. It is a fairly clear history. A soil once 
teeming with wild weeds was to all appearance swept 
bare and made ready for new sowing: skilled gardeners 
chose carefully the best of herbs and plants and tended 
the garden sedulously. But the bounds of the garden 
kept spreading all the while into strange untended 
ground, and even within the original walls the weeding 
had been hasty and incomplete. At the end of a few 


generations all was a wilderness of weeds again, weeds 


rank and luxuriant and sometimes extremely beautiful, 
with a half-strangled garden flower or two gleaming 
here and there in the tangle of them. Does that 
comparison seem disrespectful to religion? Is philo- 


sophy all flowers and traditional belief all weeds? Well, 


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IV THE FAILURE OF NERVE 161 


think what a weed is. It is only a name for all the 
natural wild vegetation which the earth sends up of 
herself, which lives and will live without the conscious 
labour of man. The flowers are what we keep alive 
with difficulty ; the weeds are what conquer us. 

It has been well observed by Zeller that the 
great weakness of all ancient thought, not excepting 
Socratic thought, was that instead of appealing to | 
objective experiment it appealed to some subjective | 
sense of fitness. There were exceptions, of course : 
Democritus, Eratosthenes, Hippocrates, and to a great 
extent Aristotle. But in general there was a strong 
tendency to follow Plato in supposing that people could 
really solve questions by an appeal to their inner 
consciousness. One result of this, no doubt, was a 
tendency to lay too much stress on mere agreement. 
It is obvious, when one thinks about it, that quite often. 
a large number of people who know nothing about a 
subject will all agree and all be wrong. Yet we find 
the most radical of ancient philosophers unconsciously 
dominated by the argument ex consensu gentium. It 
is hard to find two more uncompromising thinkers 
than Zeno and Epicurus. Yet both of them, when 
they are almost free from the popular superstitions, 
when they have constructed complete systems which, 
if not absolutely logic-proof, are calculated at least 
to keep out the weather for a century or so, open 
curious side-doors at the last moment and let in all 
the gods of mythology. True, they are admitted as 

1 Usener, Epicurea (1887), pp. 232 ff.; Diels, Doxographt Graect 
(1879), p. 306; Arnim, Stotcorum Veterum Fragmenta (1903-5), 


Chrysippus I0I4, 1019. 
2960 x 


162 THE FAILURE OF NERVE IV 


suspicious characters, and under promise of good 
behaviour. Epicurus explains that they do not and 
cannot do anything whatever to anybody; Zeno 
explains that they are not anthropomorphic, and are 
only symbols or emanations or subordinates of the all- 
ruling Unity ; both parties get rid of the myths. But 
the two great reformers have admitted a dangerous 
principle. The general consensus of humanity, they 
say, shows that there are gods, and gods which in 
mind, if not also in visual appearance, resemble man. 
Epicurus succeeded in barring the door, and admitted 
nothing more. But the Stoics presently found them- 
selves admitting or insisting that the same consensus 
proved the existence of daemons, of witchcraft, of 
divination, and when they combined with the Platonic 
school, of more dangerous elements still. 

I take the Stoics and Epicureans as the two most 
radical schools. On the whole both of them fought 
steadily and strongly against the growth of superstition, 
or, if you like to put it in other language, against the 
dumb demands of man’s infra-rational nature. ‘The 
glory of the Stoics is to have built up a religion of 
‘extraordinary nobleness ; the glory of the Epicureans 
_is to have upheld an ideal of sanity and humanity stark 
‘upright amid a reeling world, and, like the old Spartans, 
‘mever to have yielded one inch of ground to the 
‘common foe. , 
The great thing to remember is that the mind of 
man cannot be enlightened permanently by merely 
teaching him to reject some particular set of super- 
stitions. ‘There is an infinite supply of other super- 


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IV THE FAILURE OF NERVE 163 


stitions always at hand; and the mind that desires 
such things—that is, the mind that has not trained 
itself to the hard discipline of reasonableness and 
honesty, will, as soon as its devils are cast out, proceed 
to fill itself with their relations. 


Let us first consider the result of the mere denial 
of the Olympian religion. The essential postulate of 
that religion was that the world is governed by a 
number of definite personal gods, possessed of a human 
sense of justice and fairness and capable of being in- 
fluenced by normal human motives. In general, they 
helped the good and punished the bad, though doubt- 
less they tended too much to regard as good those who 
paid them proper attention and as bad those who did 
not. 

Speaking broadly, what was left when this concep- 
tion proved inadequate? If it was not these personal 
gods who made things happen, what was it? If the 
Tower of Siloam was not deliberately thrown down 
by the gods so as to kill and hurt a carefully collected 
number of wicked people, while letting the good 
escape, what was the explanation of its falling? ‘The 
answer is obvious, but it can be put in two ways. You 
can either say: ‘It was just chance that the Tower 
fell at that particular moment when So-and-so was 
under it.’ Or you can say, with rather more reflection 
but not any more common sense: ‘ It fell because of 
a definite chain of causes, a certain degree of progressive 
decay in the building, a certain definite pressure, &c. 
It was bound to fall.’ 


164 THE FAILURE OF NERVE IV 


There is no real difference in these statements, at 
least in the meaning of those who ordinarily utter them. 
Both are compatible with a reasonable and scientific 
view of the world. But in the Hellenistic Age, when 
Greek thought was spreading rapidly and superficially 
over vast semi-barbarous populations whose minds were 
not ripe for it, both views turned back instinctively 
into a theology as personal as that of the Olympians. 
It was not, of course, Zeus or Apollo who willed this ; 
every one knew so much: it happened by Chance. 
That is, Chance or Fortune willed it. And Tuyy 
became a goddess like the rest. The great catastrophes, 
the great transformations of the mediterranean world 
which marked the Hellenistic period, had a strong 
influence here. If Alexander and his generals had 
practised some severely orthodox Macedonian religion, 
it would have been easy to see that the Gods of Mace- 
don were the real rulers of the world. But they most 
markedly did not. ‘They accepted hospitably all the 
religions that crossed their path. Some power or other 
was disturbing the world, that was clear. It was not 
exactly the work of man, because sometimes the 
good were exalted, sometimes the bad; there was no 
consistent purpose in the story. It was just Fortune. 
Happy 1s the man who knows how to placate Fortune 
and make her smile upon him! 

It is worth remembering that the best seed-ground 
for superstition is a society in which the fortunes of 
men seem to bear practically no relation to their merits 
and efforts. A stable and well-governed society does 
tend, speaking roughly, to ensure that the Virtuous 


IV THE FAILURE OF NERVE 165 


and Industrious Apprentice shall succeed in life, while 
the Wicked and Idle Apprentice fails. And in such 
a society people tend to lay stress on the reasonable 
or visible chains of causation. But in a country 
suffering from earthquakes or pestilences, in a court 
governed by the whim of a despot, in a district which 
is habitually the seat of a war between alien armies, 
the ordinary virtues of diligence, honesty, and kindli- 
ness seem to be of little avail. The only way to escape 
destruction is to win the favour of the prevailing 
powers, take the side of the strongest invader, flatter 
the despot, placate the Fate or Fortune or angry 
god that is sending the earthquake or the pestilence. 
The Hellenistic period pretty certainly falls in some 
degree under all of these categories. And one result is 
the sudden and enormous spread of the worship of 
Fortune. Of course, there was always a protest. 
There is the famous 


Nullum numen habes si sit prudentia: nos te, 
Nos facimus, Fortuna, deam, 


taken by Juvenal from the Greek. There are many 
unguarded phrases and at least three corrections in 
Polybius.t Most interesting of all perhaps, there is the 
first oration of Plutarch on the Fortune of Alexander.” 


eave xe 2051.2) Polyb. 11.38) 5 3X. .§.\8is- xvill ii, 5, 

2 Cf. also his Consolatio ad Apollonium. ‘Vhe earliest text is 
perhaps the interesting fragment of Demetrius of Phalerum (fr. 19, 
in F. H, G. ii. 368), written about 317 B. c. It is quoted with admira- 
tion by Polybius xxix. 21, with reference to the defeat of Perseus of 
Macedon by the Romans : 

‘One must often remember the saying of Demetrius of Phalerum... 


166 THE FAILURE OF NERVE IV 


A sentence in Pliny’s Natural History, i1. 22, seems to 
go back to Hellenistic sources : | 


‘Throughout the whole world, at every place and 
hour, by every voice Fortune alone is invoked and her 
name spoken: she is the one defendant, the one 
culprit, the one thought in men’s minds, the one object 
of praise, the one cause. She is worshipped with 
insults, counted as fickle and often as blind, wandering, 
inconsistent, elusive, changeful, and friend of the 
unworthy. ... We are so much at the mercy of chance 
that Chance is our god.’ 


The word used is first Fortuna and then Sors. ‘This 
shows how little real difference there is between the 
two apparently contradictory conceptions.—‘* Chance 
would have it so.’ ‘It was fated to be.’ The sting 
of both phrases—their pleasant bitterness when played 


in his Treatise on Fortune. .. . “‘ If you were to take not an indefinite 
time, nor many generations, but just the fifty years before this, you 
could see in them the violence of Fortune. Fifty years ago do you 
suppose that either the Macedonians or the King of Macedon, or the 
Persians or the King of Persia, if some God had foretold them what 
was to come, would ever have believed that by the present time the 
Persians, who were then masters of almost all the inhabited world, 
would have ceased to be even a geographical name, while the Mace- 
donians, who were then not even a name, would be rulers of all? Yet 
this Fortune, who bears no relation to our method of life, but trans- 
forms everything in the way we do not expect and displays her power 
by surprises, is at the present moment showing all the world that, 
when she puts the Macedonians into the rich inheritance of the Persian, 
she has only lent them these good things until she changes her mind 
about them.” Which has now happened in the case of Perseus. The 
words of Demetrius were a prophecy uttered, as it were, by inspired 
lips,’ 


es 


IV THE FAILURE OF NERVE 167 


with, their quality of poison when believed—lies in 
their denial of the value of human endeavour. 

Yet on the whole, as one might expect, the believers 
in Destiny are a more respectable congregation than 
the worshippers of Chance. It requires a certain 
amount of thoughtfulness to rise to the conception that 
nothing really happens without a cause. It is the begin- 
ning, perhaps, of science. Ionic philosophers of the fifth 
century had laid stress on the ’Avayxyn dvows,' what 
we should call the Chain of causesin Nature. After the 
rise of Stoicism Fate becomes something less physical, 
more related to conscious purpose. It is not Ananké 
but Hermarmené. Weimarmené, in the striking simile 
of Zeno,” is like a fine thread running through the whole 
of existence—the world, we must remember, was to 
the Stoics a live thing—like that invisible thread of life 
which, in heredity, passes on from generation to genera- 
tion of living species and keeps the type alive ; it runs 
causing, causing for ever, both the infinitesimal and 
theinfinite. Itis the Adyos rod Kéopov,’ the Novs Auds, 
the Reason of the World or the mind of Zeus, rather 
difficult to distinguish from the Pronoia or Providence 
which is the work of God and indeed the very essence 
of God. Thus it is not really an external and alien 
force. For the human soul itself is a fragment or 
effluence of the divine, and this Law of God is also the 
law of man’s own Phusis. As long as you act in accord- 
ance with your true self you are complying with that 


1 Eur., Tro. 886. Literally it means ‘The Compulsion in the way 
Things grow ’. 
2 Zeno, fr. 87, Arnim. 3 Chrysippus, fr. 913, Arnim. 


168 THE FAILURE OF NERVE as 


divine Eipappévy or Ipévo.a, whose service is perfect 
freedom. Only when you are false to your own nature 
and become a rebel against the kingdom of God which 
is within you, are you dragged perforce behind the 
chariot-wheels. The doctrine is implied in Cleanthes’ 
celebrated Hymn to Destiny and is explained clearly 
by Plotinus.* 

That isa noble conception. But the vulgar of course 
can turn Kismet into a stupid idol, as easily as they can 


Fortune. And Epicurus may have had some excuse 


for exclaiming that he would sooner be a slave to the 
old gods of the vulgar, than to the Destiny of the 
philosophers.’ 

So much for the result in superstitious minds of the 
denial, or rather the removal, of the Olympian Gods. 
It landed men in the worship of Fortune or of Fate. 


Next, let us consider what happened when, instead 
of merely rejecting the Gods en masse, people tried 
carefully to collect what remained of religion after 
the Olympian system fell. 

Aristotle himself gives us a fairly clear answer. He 
held that the origins of man’s idea (€vvota) of the 
Divine were twofold,® the phenomena of the sky and 


the phenomena of the human soul. It is very much 


what Kant found two thousand years later. The 
spectacle of the vast and ordered movements of the 


1 Cleanthes, 527, Arnim. "Ayov d€ p’, © Zed, kai ov y’ 7» Terpo- 
pevn, kTA. Plotinus, Eun, 111.1. 10. 

2 Epicurus, Third Letter. Usener, p. 65, 12 = Diog. La. x. 1343 

3 Aristotle, fr. 12 ff. 


IV THE FAILURE OF NERVE 169 


heavenly bodies are compared by him in a famous 
fragment with the marching forth of Homer’s armies 
before Troy. Behind such various order and strength 
there must surely be a conscious mind capable 


Koopyoat imous Te Kal avépas aomioduoras, 
To order steeds of war and mailéd men. 


It is only a step from this to regarding the sun, moon, 
and stars as themselves divine, and it is a step which 
both Plato and Aristotle, following Pythagoras and 
followed by the Stoics, take with confidence. Chrysip- 
pus gives practically the same list of gods: ‘ the Sun, 
Moon, and Stars; and Law: and men who have be- 
come Gods.’! Both the wandering stars and the fixed 
stars are ‘animate beings, divine and eternal’, self- 
acting subordinate gods. As to the divinity of the soul 
or the mind of man, the earlier generations are shy 
about it. But in the later Stoics it is itself a portion of 
the divine life. It shows this ordinarily by its power 
of reason, and more conspicuously by becoming évGeos, 
or ‘ filled with God’, in its exalted moments of pre- 
vision, ecstasy, and prophetic dreams. If reason itself 
is divine, there 1s something else in the soul which is 
even higher than reason or at least more surprisingly 
divine. 

Let us follow the history of both these remaining 

substitutes for the Olympian gods. 
C first for the Heavenly bodies. If they are to be 
AER divine, we can hardly stop there. The Earth 
is also a divine being. Old tradition has always said 

1 e.g. Chrysippus, fr. 1076, Arnim. - 
2960 Y 


170 THE FAILURE OF NERVE IV 


so, and Plato has repeated it. And if Earth is divine, 
so surely are the other elements, the Sto1cheza, Water, 
Air, and above all, Fire. For the Gods themselves are 
said by Plato to be made of fire, and the Stars visibly 
are so. ‘Though perhaps the heavenly Fire is really 
not our Fire at all, but a wéumrov copa, a ‘ Fifth 
Body ’, seeing that it seems not to burn nor the Stars 
to be consumed. 

This is persuasive enough and philosophic; but 
whither has it led us? Back to the Olympians, or rather 
behind the Olympians ; as St. Paul puts it (Gal. iv. 9), 
to ‘ the beggarly elements’. The old Koré, or Earth 
Maiden and Mother, seems to have held her own 
unshaken by the changes of time all over the Aegean 
area. She is there in prehistoric Crete with her two 
lions; with the same lions orientalized in Olympia 
and Ephesus ; in Sparta with her great marsh birds ; 
in Boeotia with her horse. She runs riot in a number 
of the Gnostic systems both pre-Christian and post- 
Christian. She forms a divine triad with the Father 
and the Son: that is ancient and natural. But she 
also becomes the Divine Wisdom, Sophia, the Divine 
Truth, Aletheia, the Holy Breath or Spirit, the 
Pneuma. Since the word for ‘spirit’ is neuter in 
Greek and masculine in Latin, this last is rather a 
surprise. It is explained when we remember that in 
Hebrew the word for Spirit, ‘ Ruah’, is mostly feminine. 
In the meantime let us notice one curious development 
in the life of this goddess. In the old religion of 
Greece and Western Asia, she begins as a Maiden, 
then in fullness of time becomes a mother. There is 


IV THE FAILURE OF NERVE 17] 


evidence also for a third stage, the widowhood of 
withering autumn. To the classical Greek this 
motherhood was quite as it should be, a due fulfilment 
of normal functions. But to the Gnostic and his 
kind it connoted a ‘ fall’, a passage from the glory 
of Virginity to a state of Sin.” The Koré becomes a 
fallen Virgin, sometimes a temptress or even a female 
devil; sometimes she has to be saved by her Son the 
Redeemer.* As far as I have observed, she loses most 
of her earthly agricultural quality, though as Selene 
or even Helen she keeps up her affinity with the 
Moon. 

Almost all the writers of the Hellenistic Age agree 
in regarding the Sun, Moon, and Stars as gods. The 
rationalists Hecataeus and Euhemerus, before going 
on to their deified men, always start with the heavenly 
bodies. When Plutarch explains in his beautiful and 
kindly way that all religions are really attempts towards 
the same goal, he clinches his argument by observing 
that we all see the same Sun and Moon though we call 
them by different names in all languages.* But the 
belief does not seem to have had much religious 


ey Lbzimis,.p, 190, n, 1. 

2 Not to Plotinus: nn. 1. ix against the Valentinians. Cf. 
Porphyry, ’Agoppai, 28. 

3 Bousset, Hauptprobleme der Gnosis, 1907, pp. 13, 21, 26, 81, &c. ; 
pp. 332 ff. She becomes Helen in the beautiful myth of the Simonian 
Gnostics—a Helen who has forgotten her name and race, and is a slave 
in a brothel in Tyre. Simon discovers her, gradually brings back her 
memory and redeems her. Irenaeus, i. 23, 2. 

4 De Iside et Osiride, 67. (He distinguishes them from the real 
God, however, just as Sallustius would.) 


172 THE FATLURE OF NERVE IV 


intensity in it, until it was reinforced by two alien 
influences. 

First, we have the ancient wership—ofthe—Sun, 
implicit, if not explicit, in a great part of the oldest 
Greek rituals, and then idealized by Plato in the 
Republic, where the Sun is the author of all light and 
life in the material world, as the Idea of Good is in the 
ideal world. ‘This worship came gradually into con- 
tact with the traditional and definite Sun-worship of 
Persia. ‘The final combination took place curiously 
late. It was the Roman conquests of Cilicia, Cappa- 
docia, Commagene, and Armenia that gave the decisive 
moment.' ‘lo men who had wearied of the myths of 
the poets, who could draw no more inspiration from 
their Apollo and Hyperion, but still had the habits 
and the craving left by their old Gods, a fresh breath 
of reality came with the entrance of “HAtos avixntos 
Mi@pas, * Mithras, the Unconquered Sun’. But long 
before the triumph of Mithraism as the military religion 
of the Roman frontier, Greek literature is permeated 
with a kind of intense language about the Sun, which 
seems derived from Plato.” In later times, in the 
fourth century a. v. for instance, it has absorbed 
some more full-blooded and less critical element 
as well. 

Secondly, all the sev ts. ‘These had a curious 
history. ‘lhe planets were of course divine and living 
bodies, so much Plato gave us. ‘Then come arguments 


1 Mithras was worshipped by the Cilician Pirates conquered by 
Pompey. Plut., Vit. Pomp. 24. 
2 éxyovos tov tpwtov Geodv. Plato (Diels, 305) ; Stoics, ib. 547, 1. 8. 


IV THE FAILURE OF NERVE 173 


and questions scattered through the Stoic and eclectic 
literature. Is it the planet itself that is divine, or is 
the planet under the guidance of a divine spirit? The 
latter seems to win the day. Anthropomorphism has 
stolen back upon us: we can use the old language and 
speak simply of the planet Mercury as ‘Eppov aornp. 
It is the star of Hermes, and Hermes is the spirit who 
guides it.1 Even Plato in his old age had much to 
say about the souls of the seven planets. Further, 
each planet has its sphere. ‘The Earth is in the centre, 
then comes the sphere of the Moon, then that of the 
Sun, and so on through a range of seven spheres. If 
all things are full of gods, as the wise ancients have 
said, what about those parts of the sphere in which the 
shining planet for the moment is not? Are they with- 
out god? Obviously not. The whole sphere is filled 
with innumerable spirits everywhere. It is all Hermes, 
all Aphrodite. (We are more familiar with the Latin 
names, Mercury and Venus.) But one part only is 
visible. “Che voice of one school, as usual, is raised in 
opposition. One veteran had seen clearly from the 
beginning whither all this sort of thing was sure to lead. 
* Epicurus approves none of these things.’* It was no 
good his having destroyed the old traditional supersti- 
tion, if people by deifying the stars were to fill the sky 

1 Aristotle (Diels, 450). dcas dé eivar Tas oaipas, TooovTous trap- 
xetv Kal Tos Kwovvras Oeods. Chrysippus (Diels, 466) ; Posidonius, 
ib. (cf. Plato, Laws, 898 ff.). See Epicurus’s Second Letter, especially 
Usener, pp. 36-47 = Diog. La. x. 86-104. On the food required 
by the heavenly bodies cf. Chrysippus, fr. 658-61, Arnim. 

2 6 de “Eikovpos otdt tovtwy éyxpive. Diels, 307%15. Cf. 
432° Io, 


174 THE FAILURE OF NERVE IV 


with seven times seven as many objects of worship 
as had been there before. He allows no Schwarmerez 
about the stars. They are not divine animate beings, 
or guided by Gods. Why cannot the astrologers leave 
God in peace? When their orbits are irregular it is 
not because they are looking for food. ‘They are just 
conglomerations of ordinary atoms of air or fire—it 
does not matter which. They are not even very 
large—only about as large as they look, or perhaps 
smaller, since most fires tend to look bigger at a dis- 
tance. They are not at all certainly everlasting. It is 
quite likely that the sun comes to an end every day, 
and a new one rises in the morning. All kinds of 
explanations are possible, and none certain. Médvoy 6 
pv00s améorw. In any case, as you value your life and 
your reason, do not begin making myths about them ! 

On other lines came what might have been the 
effective protest of real Science, when Aristarchus of 
Samos (250 B. c.) argued that the earth was not really 
the centre of the universe, but revolved round the 
Sun. But his hypothesis did not account for the 
phenomena as completely as the current theory with 
its ‘ Epicycles’; his fellow astronomers were against 
him; Cleanthes the Stoic denounced him for ‘ dis- 
turbing the Hearth of the Universe’, and his heresy 
made little headway. 

The planets in their seven spheres surrounding the 
earth continued to be objects of adoration. They had 
their special gods or guiding spirits assigned them. 
Their ordered movements through space, it was held, 


1 Heath, Aristarchos of Samos, pp. 301-10. 


IV THE FAILURE OF NERVE 175 


produce a vast and eternal harmony. It is beautiful 
beyond all earthly music, this Music of the Spheres, 
beyond all human dreams of what music might be. 
The only pity is that—except for a few individuals in 
trances—nobody has ever heard it. Circumstances 
seem always to be unfavourable. It may be that we 
are too far off, though, considering the vastness of the 
orchestra, this seems improbable. More likely we are 
merely deaf to it because it never stops and we have 
been in the middle of it since we first drew breath.? 

The planets also become Elements in the Kosmos, 
Stotcheta. It is significant that in Hellenistic theology 
the word Stoicheion, Element, gets to mean a Daemon 
—as Megethos, Greatness, means an Angel.? But 
behold a mystery! The word Stotcheta, ‘ elementa ’, 
had long been used for the Greek ABC, and in 
particular for the seven vowels aeytouw. That is 
no chance, no mere coincidence. ‘The vowels are the 
mystic signs of the Planets ; they have control over the 
planets. Hence strange prayers and magic formulae 
innumerable. 

Even the way of reckoning time changed under the 
influence of the Planets. Instead of the old division of 
the month into three periods of nine days, we find 
gradually establishing itself the week of seven days with 
each day named after its planet, Sun, Moon, Ares, 


1 Pythagoras in Diels, p. 555, 20; the best criticism is in Aristotle, 
De Caelo, chap. 9 (p. 290 b), the fullest account in Macrobius, Comm. 
in Somn. Scipionts, il. 

2 See Diels, Elementum, 1899, p. 17. These magic letters are still 
used in the Roman ritual for the consecration of churches. 


176 THE FAILURE OF NERVE IV 
Hermes, Zeus, Aphrodite, Kronos. The history of the 


Planet week is given by Dio Cassius, xxxvii. 18, in his 
account of the Jewish campaign of Pompeius. But 
it was not the Jewish week. The Jews scorned such 
idolatrous and polytheistic proceedings. It was the 
old week of Babylon, the original home of astronomy 
and planet-worship.* 

For here again a -great foreign religion came like 
water in the desert to minds reluctantly and super- 
ficially enlightened, but secretly longing for the old 
terrors and raptures from which they had been set free. 
Even in the old days Aeschylus had called the planets 
‘bright potentates, shining in the fire of heaven’, and 
Euripides had spoken of the ‘ shaft hurled from a star ’.? 
But we are told that the first teaching of astrology in 
Hellenic lands was in the time of Alexander, when 
Bérdéssos the Chaldaean set up a school in Cos and, 
according to Seneca, Belum interpretatus est. ‘This must 
mean that he translated into Greek the ‘ Eye of Bel’, 
a treatise in seventy tablets found in the library of 
Assur-bani-pal (686-626 B.c.) but composed for Sargon I 
in the third millennium s.c. Even the philosopher 
Theophrastus 1s reported by Proclus® as saying that 
“the most extraordinary thing of his age was the lore 
of the Chaldaeans, who foretold not only events of 
public interest but even the lives and deaths of 


1 A seven-day week was known to Pseudo-Hippocrates wept capxov 
ad fin., but the date of that treatise is very uncertain. 

2 Aesch., 4g.6; Eur., Hip. 530. Also 4g. 365, where dorpav BéXdos 
goes together and pyre rpo Kaipov pn’ rep. 

3 Proclus, /n Timacum, 285 ¥ ; Seneca, Nat. Quaest. iil. 29, I. 


IV THE FAILURE OF NERVE 177 


individuals’. One wonders slightly whether Theo- 
phrastus spoke with as much implicit faith as Proclus 
suggests. But the chief account is given by Diodorus, 
11. 30 (perhaps from Hecataeus), 


‘Other nations despise the philosophy of Greece. 
It is so recent and so constantly changing. They have 
traditions which come from vast antiquity and never 
change. Notably the Chaldaeans have collected obser- 
vations of the Stars through long ages, and teach how 
every event in the heavens has its meaning, as part of 
the eternal scheme of divine forethought. Especially 
the seven Wanderers, or Planets, are called by them 
Herméneis, Interpreters: and among them the Inter- 
preter in chief 1s Saturn. Their work is to interpret 
beforehand rv tov Gear evvoray, the thought that is in 
the mind of the Gods. By their risings and settings, 
and by the colours they assume, the Chaldaeans pre- 
dict great winds and storms and waves of excessive 
heat, comets, and earthquakes, and in general all 
changes fraught with weal or woe not only to nations 
and regions of the world, but to kings and to ordinary 
men and women. Beneath the Seven are thirty Gods 
of Counsel, half below and half above the Earth; 
every ten days a Messenger or Angel star passes from 
above below and another from below above. Above 
these gods are twelve Masters, who are the twelve 
signs of the Zodiac ; and the planets pass through all 
the Houses of these twelve in turn. The Chaldaeans 
have made prophecies for various kings, such as Alex- 
ander who conquered Darius, and Antigonus and 
Seleucus Nikator, and have always been right. And 
private persons who have consulted them consider 
their wisdom as marvellous and above human power.’ 


Astrology fell upon the Hellenistic mind as a new 


disease falls upon some remote island people. The 
2960 Z 


178 THE FAILURE OF NERVE IV 


tomb of Ozymandias, as described by Diodorus 
(i. 49, 5) was covered with astrological symbols, and 
that of Antiochus I, which has been discovered in 
Commagene, is of the same character. It was natural 
for monarchs to believe that the stars watched over 
them. But every one was ready to receive the germ. 
The Epicureans, of course, held out, and so did 
Panaetius, the coolest head among the Stoics. But 
the Stoics_as a whole gave way. They formed with 
200d reason the leading school of philosophy, and it 
would have been a service to mankind if they had 
resisted. But they were already committed to a belief 
in the deity of the stars and to the doctrine of Heimar- 
mené, or Destiny. They believed in the pervading 
~Pronoia,! or tore one of the divine mind, and in 
the Supardbera trav 6\wv—the Sympathy of all Crea- 
tion,” whereby whatever happens to any one part, 
however remote or insignificant, affects all the rest. 
It seemed only a natural and beautiful illustration of 
this Sympathy that the movements of the Stars should 
be bound up with the sufferings of man. They also 
appealed to the general belief in prophecy and divina- 
tion.? If a prophet can foretell that such and such an 
event will happen, then it is obviously fated to happen. 

1 Chrysippus, 1187-95. Esse divinationem si di sint et providentia. 

* Cicero, De Nat. De. iii. 11, 28; especially De Divinatione, ii. 14, 34; 
60, 124; 69, 142. ‘Qua ex coniunctione naturae et quasi concentu 
atque consensu, quam ovprabecay Graeci appellant, convenire potest 
aut fissum iecoris cum lucello meo aut meus quaesticulus cum caelo, 
terra rerumque natura?’ asks the sceptic in the second of these 


passages. 
3 Chrysippus, 939-44. Vaticinatio probat fati necessitatem. 


IV THE FAILURE OF NERVE 179 
Foreknowledge implies | Predestination. This belief in 


prophecy was, in reality, a a sort of appeal to fact and to 
common sense. People could produce then, as they 
can now, a large number of striking cases of second 
sight, presentiment, clairvoyance, actual prophecy and 
the like ;' and it was more difficult then to test them. 
The argument involved Stoicism with some question- 
able allies. Epicureans and sceptics of the Academy 
might well mock at the sight of a great man like Chry- 
sippus or Posidonius resting an important part of his 
een on the undetected frauds of a shady Levantine 
‘medium’. Still the Stoics could not but welcome/_ 
the arrival of a system of prophecy and predestination | 
which, however the incredulous might rail at it, pos- 
sessed at least great antiquity and great stores of 
learning, which was respectable, recondite, and in 
a way sublime. 
In all the religious systems of later antiquity, if 
I mistake not, the Seven Planets play some lordly or 
terrifying part. The great Mithras Liturgy, unearthed 
by Dieterich from a magical papyrus in Paris,” repeat- 
edly confronts the worshipper with the seven vowels 
as names of ¢‘ the Seven Deathless Kosmokratores ’, or 
Lords of the aga and seems, under their influence, 
to go off into its ‘Seven Maidens with heads of ser- 
pents, in white raiment ’, and its divers other Sevens. 


1 Chrysippus, 1214, 1200-6, 

2 Eine Mithrasliturgie, 1903. The MS. is 574 Supplément grec de 
la Bibl. Nationale. The formulae of various religions were used as 
instruments of magic, as our own witches used the Lord’s Prayer 
backwards. 


180 THE FAILURE OF NERVE IV 


The various Hermetic and Mithraic communities, the 
Naassenes described by Hippolytus,' and other Gnostic 
bodies, authors like Macrobius and even Cicero in his 
Somnium Sctptonts, are full of the influence of the seven 
planets and of the longing to escape beyond them. For 
by some simple psychological law the stars which have 
inexorably pronounced our fate, and decreed, or at 
least registered the decree, that in spite of all striving 
we must needs tread their prescribed path ; still more 
perhaps, the Stars who know in the midst of our 
laughter how that laughter will end, become inevitably 
powers of evil rather than good, beings malignant as 
well as pitiless, making life a vain thing. And Saturn, 
the chief of them, becomes the most malignant. To 
some of the Gnostics he becomes Jaldabaoth, the Lion- 
headed God, the evil Jehovah. The religion of later 
antiquity is overpoweringly absorbed in plans of escape 
from the prison of the seven planets. 

In author after author, in one community after 
another, the subject recurs. And on the whole there 
is the same answer. Here on the earth we are the 
sport of Fate; nay, on the earth itself we are worse 
off still. We are beneath the Moon, and beneath the 
Moon there is not only Fate but something more 
unworthy and equally malignant, Chance—to say 
nothing of damp and the ills of earth and bad daemons. 
Above the Moon there is no chance, only Necessity ; 


1 Refutatio Omnium Haeresium, v.7. ‘They worshipped the Serpent, 
Nabash (WM), 

* Bousset, p. 351. The hostility of Zoroastrianism to the old 
Babylonian planet gods was doubtless at work also. Ib. pp. 37-46. 


IV THE FAILURE OF NERVE 181 


there is the will of the other six Kosmokratores, Rulers 
of the Universe. But above them all there is an Eighth 
region—they call it simply the Ogdoas—the home of 
the ultimate God," whatever He is named, whose being 
was before the Kosmos. In this Sphere is true Being 
and Freedom. And more than freedom, there is the 
ultimate Union with God. For that spark of divine 
life which is man’s soul is not merely, as some have 
said, an améppo.a Tov aoTpwr, an effluence of the stars : 
it comes direct from the first and ultimate God, the 
Alpha and Omega, who is beyond the Planets. Though 
the Kosmokratores cast us to and fro like their slaves 
or dead chattels, in soul at least we are of equal birth 
with them. The Mithraic votary, when their wrathful 
and tremendous faces break in upon his vision, answers 
them unterrified: éyd eiue ctumdavos viv aorHp, 
‘I am your fellow wanderer, your fellow Star.’ The 
Orphic carried to the grave on his golden scroll the 
same boast: first, ‘I am the child of Earth and of the 
starry Heaven’; then later, ‘ I too am become God ’.” 
The Gnostic writings consist largely of charms to be 
uttered by the Soul to each of the Planets in turn, 
as it pursues its perilous path past all of them to its 
ultimate home. 

That journey awaits us after death; but in the 
meantime? In the meantime there are initiations, 
sacraments, mystic ways of communion with God. 
To see God face to face is, to the ordinary unprepared 
man, sheer death. But to see Him aftér due purifica- 


1 Or, in some Gnostic systems, of the Mother. 
2 Harrison, Prolegomena, Appendix on the Orphic tablets. 


182 THE FAILURE OF NERVE IV 


tion, to be led to Him along the true Way by an 
initiating Priest, is the ultimate blessing of human life. 
It is to die and be born again. ‘There were regular 
official initiations. We have one in the Mithras- 
Liturgy, more than one in the Corpus Hermeticum. 
Apuleius ' tells us at some length, though in guarded 
language, how he was initiated to Isis and became ‘ her 
image’. After much fasting, clad in holy garments 
and led by the High Priest, he crossed the threshold 
of Death and passed through all the Elements. The 
Sun shone upon him at midnight, and he saw the Gods 
of Heaven and of Hades. In the morning he was clad 
in the Robe of Heaven, set up on a pedestal in front of 
the Goddess and worshipped by the congregation as 
a God. He had been made one with Osiris or Horus 
or whatever name it pleased that Sun-God to be 
called. Apuleius does not reveal it. 

There were also, of course, the irregular personal 
initiations and visions of god vouchsafed to persons 
of special prophetic powers. ..St,..Paul,.jwe.may remem- 
ber, knew personally a man who had actually been 
snatched up into the Third Heaven, and another who 
was similarly rapt into Paradise, where he heard 
unspeakable words ;* whether in the body or not, the 
apostle leaves undecided. He himself on the road to 
Damascus had seen the Christ in glory, not after the 


1 Ap. Metamorphoses, xi. 

2 2 Cor. xii. 2 and 3 (he may be referring in veiled language to 
himself) ; Gal. i. 12 ff. ;, Acts ix. 1-22. On the difference of tone and 
fidelity between the Epistles and the Acts see the interesting remarks 
of Prof. P. Gardner, The Religious Experience of St. Paul, pp. 5 ff. 


iv THE FAILURE OF NERVE 183 
flesh. The philosopher Plotinus, so his disciple tells 


us, was united with God in trance four times in five 
WiEATS.1 

We seem to have travelled far from the simplicity 
of early Greek religion. Yet, apart always from Plo- 
/ tinus, who is singularly aloof, most of the movement 
has been a reaction under Oriental and barbarous in- 
fluences towards the most primitive pre-Hellenic cults, 
The union of man with God came regularly through 
Ekstasts—the soul must get clear of its body—and 
Enthoustasmos—the God must enter and dwell inside 
the worshipper. But the means to this union, while 
sometimes allegorized and spiritualized to the last 
degree, are sometimes of the most primitive sort. The 
vagaries of religious emotion are apt to reach very low 
as well as very high in the scale of human nature. 
Certainly the primitive Thracian savages, who drank 
themselves mad with the hot blood of their God-beast, 


1 Porphyry, Vtta Plotint, 23. ‘ We have explained that he was good 
and gentle, mild and merciful; we who lived with him could feel 
it. We have said that he was vigilant and pure of soul, and always 
striving towards the Divine, which with all his soul he loved... . 
And thus it happened to this extraordinary man, constantly lifting 
himself up towards the first and transcendent God by thought and the 
ways explained by Plato in the Symposium, that there actually came 
a vision of that God who is without shape or form, established above 
the understanding and all the intelligible world. ‘Io whom I, Porphyry, 
being now in my sixty-eighth year, profess that I once drew near 
and was made one with him. At any rate he appeared to Plotinus 
‘4 goal close at hand”. For his whole end and goal was to be made 
One and draw near to the supreme God. And he attained that goal 
four times, I think, while I was living with him—not potentially but 
in actuality, though an actuality which surpasses speech.’ 


184 THE FAILURE OF NERVE iV 


would have been quite at home in some of these 
rituals, though in others they would have been put 
off with some substitute for the actual blood. The 
primitive priestesses who waited in a bridal chamber 
for the Divine Bridegroom, even the Cretan Kourétes 
with their Zeus Kourés * and those strange hierophants 
of the ‘ Men’s House ’ whose initiations are written on 
the rocks of ‘Thera,*would have found rites very like 
their own reblossoming on earth after the fall of 
Hellenism. ‘Prepare thyself as a bride to receive 
her bridegroom,’ says Markos the Gnostic,” ‘ that thou 
mayst be what I am and I what thou art.’ ‘I in 
thee, and thou in me!’ is the ecstatic cry of one of 
the Hermes liturgies. Before that the prayer has been 
‘Enter into me as a babe into the womb of a woman ’.® 

In almost all the liturgies that I have read need is felt 
for a mediator between the seeker after God and his 
goal. Mlithras himself was a Mesités, a Mediator, 
between Ormuzd and Ahriman, but the ordinary 
mediator is more like an interpreter or an adept with 
inner knowledge which he reveals to the outsider. The 
circumstances out of which these systems grew have left 
their mark on the new gods themselves. As usual, the 
social structure of the worshippers is reflected in their 
objects of worship. When the Chaldaeans came to 
Cos, when the Thracians in the Piraeus set up their 


1 C. I. G., vol. xii, fasc. 3; and Bethe in Rhein. Mus., N. F., xlii, 
438-75. 3 Trenaéus, 1°13) 73 

3 Bousset, chap. vii; Reitzenstein, Mystertenreligionen, pp. 20 ff., 
with excursus; Poimandres, 226ff.; Dieterich, Mithrasliturgie, 
pp. 121 fi. 


IV THE FAILURE OF NERVE 85 


national worship of Bendis, when the Egyptians in the 
same port founded their society for the Egyptian ritual 
of Isis, when the Jews at Assuan in the fifth century 
B.c. established their own temple, in each case there 
would come proselytes to whom the truth must be 
explained and interpreted, sometimes perhaps softened. 
And in each case there is behind the particular priest or 
initiator there present some greater authority in the 
land he comes from. Behind any explanation that 
can be made in the Piraeus, there is a deeper and higher 
explanation known only to the great master in Jeru- 
salem, in Egypt, in Babylon, or perhaps in some un- 
explored and ever-receding region of the east. This — 
series of revelations, one behind the other, is a charac- / 
teristic of all these mixed Graeco-Oriental religions. 

Most of the Hermetic treatises are put in the form of 
_ initiations or lessons revealed by a ‘ father’ to a ‘son’, 
by Ptah to Hermes, by Hermes to Thoth or Asclepios, 
and by one of them to us. It was an ancient formula, 
a natural vehicle for traditional wisdom in Egypt, 
where the young priest became regularly the ‘ son’ of 
the old priest. It is a form that we find in Greece 
itself as early as Euripides, whose Melanippe says of 
her cosmological doctrines, 


‘It is not my word but my Mother’s word.’ ! 


It was doubtless the language of the old Medicine-Man 
to his disciple. In one fine liturgy Thoth wrestles 
with Hermes in agony of spirit, till Hermes is forced 
to reveal to him the path to union with God which 


Bune. 484. 
2960 Aa 


186 THE FAILURE OF NERVE IV 


he himself has trodden before. At the end of the 
Mithras liturgy the devotee who has passed through 
the mystic ordeals and seen his god face to face, is told : 
‘ After this you can show the way to others.’ 

But this leads us to the second great division of our 
subject. We turn from the phenomena of the sky to 
those of the soul. 


If what I have written elsewhere is right, one of the 
greatest works of the Hellenic spirit, and especially of 
fifth-century Athens, was to insist on what seems to 
us such a commonplace truism, the difference between 
Man and God. Sophrosyné in religion was the mes- 
sage of the classical age. But the ages before and after 
had no belief in such a lesson. ‘The old Medicine-Man 
was perhaps himself the first Theos. At any rate the 
primeval kings and queens were treated as divine.t Just 
for a few great generations, it would seem, humanity 
rose to a sufficient height of self-criticism and self- 
restraint to reject these dreams of self-abasement or 
megalomania. But the effort was too great for the 
average world ; and in a later age nearly all the kings 
and rulers—all people in fact who can command an 
adequate number of flatterers—become divine beings 
again. Let us consider how it came about. 

First there was the explicit recognition by the 
soberest philosophers of the divine element in man’s 

1 R. G. E.3, pp. 135-40. I do not touch on the political side of this 
apotheosis of Hellenistic kings; it is well brought out in Ferguson’s 
Hellenistic Athens, e.g. p. 108 f., also p. 11 f. and note. Antigonus 


Gonatas refused to be worshipped (Tarn, p. 250 f.). For Sallustius’s 
opinion, see below, p. 266, chap. xviii ad fin. 


IV THE FAILURE OF NERVE 187 


soul.’ Aristotle himself built an altar to Plato. He did 
nothing superstitious ; he did not call Plato a god, but 
we can see from his beautiful elegy to Eudemus, that 
he naturally and easily used language of worship which 
would seem a little strange to us. It is the same 
emotion—a noble and just emotion on the whole— 
which led the philosophic schools to treat their founders 
as ‘ heroes ’, and which has peopled most of Europe and 
Asia with the memories and the worship of saints. But 
we should remember that only a rare mind will make its 
divine man of such material as Plato. ‘The common way 
to dazzle men’s eyes is a more brutal and obvious one. 

To people who were at all accustomed to the 
conception of a God-Man it was difficult not to feel 
that the conception was realized in Alexander. His 
tremendous power, his brilliant personality, his achieve- 
ments beggaring the fables of the poets, put people 
in the right mind for worship. Then came the fact 
that the kings whom he conquered were, as a matter 
of fact, mostly regarded by their subjects as divine 
beings.” It was easy, it was almost inevitable, for 
those who worshipped the ‘ God ’? Darius to feel that 
it was no man but a greater god who had overthrown 

1 Cf. Wuxi oiknrypiov daipoves, Democr. 171, Diels, and Alcmaeon 
is said by Cicero to have attributed divinity to the Stars and the Soul. 
Melissus and Zeno Oeias oterar Tas Wuyas. The phrase twes tiv oxy 
dvvapwv ard Tov dotpwv péovoay, Diels 651, must refer to some 
Gnostic sect. 

2 See for instance Frazer, Golden Bough®, part I, i. 417-19. 

3 Aesch. Pers. 157, 644. (Beds), 642 (daiuwv). Mr. Bevan however 


suspects that Aeschylus misunderstood his Persian sources: see his 
article on ‘ Deification ’ in Hastings’s Dictionary of Religion. 


188 THE FAILURE OF NERVE IV 


Darius. ‘The incense which had been burned before 
those conquered gods was naturally offered to their 
conqueror. He did not refuse it. It was not good 
policy to do so, and self-depreciation is not apt to be 
one of the weaknesses of the born ruler.’ But besides 
all this, if you are to judge a God by his fruits, what 
God could produce better credentials? Men had often 
seen Zeus defied with impunity ; they had seen faithful 
servants of Apollo come to bad ends. But those who 
defied Alexander, however great they might be, always 
rued their defiance, and those who were faithful to 
him always received their reward. With his successors 
the worship became more official. Seleucus, Ptole- 
maeus, Antigonus, Demetrius, all in different degrees 
_and different styles are deified by the acclamations 
of adoring subjects. Ptolemy Philadelphus seems to 
have been the first to claim definite divine honours 
during his own life. On the death of his wife in 271 
he proclaimed her deity and his own as well in the 
worship of the Theoi Adelphoi, the ‘ Gods Brethren ’. 
Of course there was flattery in all this, ordinary self- 
interested lying flattery, and its inevitable accompani- 
ment, megalomania. Any reading of the personal 
history of the Ptolemies, the Seleucidae or the Caesars 
shows it. But that is not the whole explanation. 


1 Cf. Aristotle on the Meyaddyvyos, Eth. Nic. 1123 b. 15. et de 
on peydduv éavrov d€.ot dios dv, kal padiota Tov peylorwv, rept ev 

, A ¥ , \ A oN s & a a_ 3 , 
padirta av ein. ... péyotov O€ Todtr’ av Oeinuev & rots Oeois dzrove- 
powev. But these kings clearly transgressed the mean. For the 
satirical comments of various public men in Athens see Ed. Meyer, 
Kleine Schriften, 301 ff., 330. 


IV THE FAILURE OF NERVE 189 


One of the characteristics of the period of the 
Diadochi is the accumulation of capital and military 
force in the hands of individuals. The Ptolemies and 
Seleucidae had at any moment at their disposal powers 
very much greater than any Pericles or Nicias or 
Lysander.’ The folk of the small cities of the Aegean 
hinterlands must have felt towards these great strangers 
almost as poor Indian peasants in time of flood and 
famine feel towards an English official. ‘There were 
men now on earth who could do the things that had 
hitherto been beyond the power of man. Were several 
cities thrown down by earthquake; here was one 
who by his nod could build them again. Famines had 
always occurred and been mostly incurable. Here was 
one who could without effort allay a famine. Provinces 
were harried and wasted by habitual wars: the even- 
tual conqueror had destroyed whole provinces in 
making the wars ; now, as he had destroyed, he could 
also save. ‘ What do you mean by a god,’ the simple 
man 1 might say, ‘1f these men are not Said The ee 


story clearly. “Antiochus Epiphanés the god made 
manifest’; Ptolemaios Euergetés, Ptolemaios Sdtér. 
Occasionally we have a Keraunos or a Nikator, a 
‘Thunderbolt ’ or a ‘ God of Mana’, but mostly it is 
_ Sotér, Euergetés and Epiphanés, the Saviour, the 
Benefactor, the God made manifest, in constant alter- 
nation. In the honorific inscriptions and in the 


! Lysander too had altars raised to him by some Asiatic cities, 


190 THE FAILURE OF NERVE tv 


writings of the learned, philanthropy (¢iAavOparia) is 
by far the most prominent characteristic of the God 
upon earth. Was it that people really felt that to 
save or benefit mankind was a more godlike thing than 
to blast and destroy them? Philosophers have generally 
said that, and the vulgar pretended to believe them. 
It was at least politic, when ministering to the half- 
insane pride of one of these princes, to remind him of 
his mercy rather than of his wrath. | 

Wendland in his brilliant book, Hellenistisch- 
rimische Kultur, calls attention to an inscription of 
the year 196 B.c. in honour of the young Ptolemaios 
Epiphanés, who was made manifest at the age of 
twelve years.’ It is a typical document of Graeco- 
Egyptian king-worship : 


‘In the reign of the young king by inheritance 
from his Father, Lord of the Diadems, great in glory, 
pacificator of Egypt and pious towards the gods, 
superior over his adversaries, Restorer of the life 
of man, Lord of the Periods of Thirty Years, like 
Hephaistos the Great, King like the Sun, the Great 
King of the Upper and Lower Lands ; offspring of the 
Gods of the Love of the Father, whom Hephaistos has 
approved, to whom the Sun has given Victory ; living 
image of Zeus ; Son of the Sun, Ptolemaios the ever- 
living, beloved by Phtha; in the ninth year of Aétos 
son of Aétos, Priest of Alexander and the Gods Saviours 
and the Gods Brethren and the Gods Benefactors and 
the Gods of the Love of the Father and the God 
Manifest for whom thanks be given: ’ 


1 Dittenberger, Imscr. Ortentis Graect, 90; Wendland, Helleni- 
stisch-rémische Kultur, 1907, p. 74 f. and notes. 


IV THE FAILURE OF NERVE 19! 


The Priests who came to his coronation ceremony 
at Memphis proclaim : 


_ “Seeing that King Ptolemaios ever-living, beloved 
of Phtha, God Manifest for whom Thanks be given, 
born of King Ptolemaios and Queen Arsinoe, the Gods 
of the Love of the Father, has done many benefactions 
to the Temples and those in them and all those beneath 
his rule, being from the beginning God born of God 
and Goddess, like Horus son of Isis and Osiris, who 
came to the help of his father Osiris (and?) in his 
benevolent disposition towards the Gods has conse- 
crated to the temples revenues of silver and of corn, 
and has undergone many expenses in order to lead 
Egypt into the sunlight and give peace to the Temples, 
and has with all his powers shown love of mankind.’ 


When the people of Lycopolis revolted, we hear : 


‘in a short time he took the city by storm and slew 
all the Impious who dwelt in it, even as Hermes and 
Horus, son of Isis and Osiris, conquered those who of 
old revolted in the same regions... in return for which 
the Gods have granted him Health Victory Power and 
all other good things, the Kingdom remaining to him 
and his sons for time everlasting.’ * 


1 Several of the phrases are interesting. The last gift of the heavenly 
gods to this Theos is the old gift of Mana. In Hesiod it was Kdpros 
te Bin re, the two ministers who are never away from the King Zeus. 
In Aeschylus it was Kratos and Bia who subdue Prometheus. In 
‘Tyrtaeus itwas Niky xat Kdpros. In other inscriptions of the Ptolemaic 
age it is Sorypia kat Nixy or Swrypia xat Niky aidvos. In the current 
Christian liturgies it is ‘the Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory’. 
R. G. E.3, p. 135, n. The new conception, as always, is rooted in the 
old. ‘The Gods Saviours, Brethren ’, &c., are of course Ptolemy Soter, 
Ptolemy Philadelphus, &c., and their Queens. The phrases eixov 


a A A , , € Q a a 
looa rod As, vidos tod “HAlov, wyarnpevos tro tov 6a, are 


192 THE FAILURE OF NERVE IV 


The conclusion which the Priests draw from these 
facts is that the young king’s titles and honours are 
insufficient and should be increased. It is a typical 


rand terribly un-Hellenic document of the Hellenistic 


God-man in his appearance as King. 

Now the early successors of Alexander mostly pro- 
fessed themselves members of the Stoic school, and 
in the mouth of a Stoic this doctrine of the potential 
divinity of man was an inspiring one. To them virtue 
was the really divine thing in man; and the most 
divine kind of virtue was that of helping humanity. 
To loye-and help humanity is, according to Stoic 
doctrine, the work and the very essence of God. If 
you take away Pronoia from God, says Chrysippus,’ 
it is like taking away light and heat from fire. This 
doctrine is magnificently expressed by Pliny in a 
phrase that is probably translated from Posidonius : 
‘God is the helping of man by man; and that is the 
way to eternal glory.’ ? 

The conception took root in the minds of many 
Romans. A great Roman governor often had the 
chance of thus helping humanity on a vast scale, and 
liked to think that such a life opened the way to heaven. 
‘One should conceive’, says Cicero (Lusc. i. 32), ‘ the 
gods as like men who feel themselves born for the work 
characteristic of the religious language of this period. Cf. also Col. 
i. 14, eikwv Tov Oeov tov dopatov ; 2 Cor. iv. 4; Ephes. i. 5, 6. 

1 Fr, 1118, Arnim. Cf. Antipater, fr. 33, 34, ro edmountixov is 
part of the definition of Deity. 

2 Plin., Nat. Hist. ii. 7, 18. Deus est mortali invare mortalem et 


haec ad aeternam gloriam via. Cf. also the striking passages from 
Cicero and others in Wendland, p. 85, n. 2. 


IV THE FAILURE OF NERVE 193 


of helping, defending, and saving humanity. Hercules 
has passed into the number of the gods. He would 
never have so passed if he had not built up that road 
_ for himself while he was among mankind.’ 

I have been using some rather late authors, though 
the ideas seem largely to come from Posidonius.! 
But before Posidonius the sort of fact on which we 
have been dwelling had had its influence on religious 
speculation. When Alexander made his conquering 
journey to India and afterwards was created a god, it 
was impossible not to reflect that almost exactly the 
same story was related in myth about Dionysus. 
Dionysus had started from India and travelled in the 
other direction : that was the only difference. A flood 
of light seemed to be thrown on all the traditional 
mythology, which, of course, had always been a puzzle 
to thoughtful men. It was impossible to believe it as 
it stood, and yet hard—in an age which had not the 
conception of any science of mythology—to think it 
was all a mass of falsehood, and the great Homer and 
Hesiod no better than liars. But the generation which 
witnessed the official deification of the various Seleu- 
cidae and Ptolemies seemed suddenly to see light. The 
traditional gods, from Heracles and Dionysus up to 
Zeus and Cronos and even Ouranos, were simply old- 
world rulers and benefactors of mankind, who had, by 
their own insistence or the gratitude of their subjects, 


1 The Stoic philosopher, teaching at Rhodes, c. 100 B.c. A man of 
immense knowledge and strong religious emotions, he moved the 
Stoa in the direction of Oriental mysticism. See Schwartz’s sketch in 
Characterkipfe®, pp. 89-98. Also Norden’s Commentary on Aenetd vi. 

2960 Bb 


194 THE FAILURE OF NERVE IV 


been transferred to the ranks of heaven. For that is. 


the exact meaning of making them divine: they are 
classed among the true immortals, the Sun and Moon 
and Stars and Corn and Wine, and the everlasting 
elements. 

The philosophic-romance-of Euhemerus, published 
_early in the third century 3.c., had instantaneous 
success and enormous influence.’ It was one of the 
first Greek books translated into Latin, and became long 
afterwards a favourite weapon of the Christian fathers 
in their polemics against polytheism. ‘ Euhemerism ’ 
was, on the face of it, a very brilliant theory; and 
it had, as we have noticed, a special appeal for the 
Romans. 

Yet, if such a conception might please the leisure of 
a statesman, it could hardly satisfy the serious thought 
of a philosopher or a religious man. If man’s soul 
really holds a fragment of God and is itself a divine 
being, its godhead cannot depend on the possession 
of great riches and armies and organized subordinates. 
If ‘the helping of man by man is God’, the help in 
question cannot be material help. The religion which 
ends in deifying only kings and millionaires may be 
vulgarly popular but is self-condemned. 

As a matter of fact the whole tendency of Greek 
philosophy after Plato, with some illustrious exceptions, 
especially among the Romanizing Stoics, was away from 
_ the outer world towards the world of the soul. We 
‘find in the religious writings of this period that the 


1 Jacoby in Pauly-Wissowa’s Realencyclopadie, vi. 954. It was 
called ‘Iepa ’Avaypady. 


a 


IV THE FAILURE OF NERVE 195 


real Saviour of men is not he who protects them against \ 
earthquake and famine, but he who in some sense saves / 
their souls. He reveals to them the Gudsis Theou, the 
Knowledge of God. The ‘ knowledge’ in question is 
not a mere intellectual knowledge. It is a complete 
union, a merging of beings. And, as we have always 
to keep reminding our cold modern intelligence, he 
who has ‘ known’ God is himself thereby deified. He 
is the Image of God, the Son of God, in a sense he 75 
God. The stratum of ideas described in the first of 
the studies will explain the ease with which transi- 
tion took place. The worshipper of Bacchos became 
Bacchos simply enough, because in reality the God 
Bacchos was originally only the projection of the 


human Bacchoi. And in the Hellenistic age the notion 


of these secondary mediating gods was made easier 
by the analogy of the human interpreters. Of course, 
we have abundant instances of actual preachers and 
miracle-workers who on their own authority posed, 
and were accepted, as gods. The adventure of 
Paul and Barnabas at Lystra? shows how easily 
such things could happen. But as a rule, I suspect, 
the most zealous priest or preacher preferred to have 
his God in the background. He preaches, he heals the 
sick and casts out devils, not in his own name but in 
the name of One who sent him. This actual present 

1 Cf, Plotin. Enn, 1. ii. 6 GAN’? 1) arovdy od« ew adpaprias civar, 
GAAG Gedy etvac. 

2 Acts xiv. 12. They called Barnabas Zeus and Paul Hermes, 
because he was 6 wyovpevos tod Adyov.—Paul also writes to the 


Galatians (iv. 14): ‘ Ye received me as a messenger of God, as ‘fesus 


Christ.’ 


196 THE FAILURE OF NERVE IV 


priest who initiates you or me is himself already an 
Image of God; but above him there are greater and 
wiser priests, above them others, and above all there 1s 
the one eternal Divine Mediator, who being in perfec- 
_ tion both man and God can alone fully reveal God to 
~ man, and lead man’s soul up the heavenly path, beyond 
Change and Fate and the Houses of the Seven Rulers, 
to its ultimate peace. I have seen somewhere a 
Gnostic or early Christian emblem which indicates 
this doctrine. Some Shepherd or Saviour stands, his 
feet on the earth, his head towering above the planets, 
lifting his follower in his outstretched arms. 


~Ehe Gnostics are still commonly thought of as a body 


of Christian heretics. In reality there were Gnostic 
sects scattered over the Hellenistic world before 
Christianity as well as after. ‘They must have been 
established in Antioch and probably in Tarsus well 
before the days c of Paul or Apollos. Their ae: 





like the Jewish Messiah, was established in men’s minds 
before the Saviour of the Christians. ‘If we look 
close’, says Professor Bousset, ‘the result emerges with 
great clearness, that the figure of the Redeemer as such 
did not wait for Christianity to force its way into the 
religion of raat but was already present there under 
various forms.’* He occurs notably in two _pre- 
Christian documents, discovered b by the keen analysis 
and profound learning of Dr. Reitzenstein: the 
Poimandres revelation printed in ‘the Corpus Hermeti- 
cum, and the sermon of the Naassenes 1 in Hippolytus, 





ee nem 


Bousset, p- 238. 





ean eres emanate 





ee 





IV THE FAILURE OF NERVE 197 


Attis-worship.’ The violent anti-Jewish bias of most 
of the sects—they speak of ‘ the accursed God of the 
Jews’ and identify him with Saturn and the Devil— 
points on the whole to pre-Christian conditions ; and 
a completely non-Christian standpoint is still visible 
in the Mandaean and Manichean systems. 

Their Redeemer is descended by a fairly clear ‘ 
genealogy from the ‘ Tritos Sétér’ of early Greece, | 
contaminated with similar figures, like Attis and | 
Adonis from Asia Minor, Osiris from Egypt, and | 
the special Jewish conception of the Messiah of the 
Chosen people. He has various names, which the name 
of Jesus or ‘ Christos’, ‘ the Anointed’, tends gradually 
to supersede. Above all he is, in some sense, Man, or 
‘the Second Man’ or ‘ the Son of Man’. The origin 
of this phrase needs a word of explanation. Since the 
ultimate unseen God, spirit though He is, made Man 
in His image, since holy men (and divine kings) are 
images of God, it follows that He is Himself Man. He 
is the real, the ultimate, the perfect and eternal Man, 
of whom all bodily men are feeble copies. He is also 
the Father ; the Saviour is his Son, ‘ the Image of the 
Father’, ‘the Second Man’, ‘the Son of Man’. The 
method in which he performs his mystery of Redemp- 
tion varies. It is haunted by the memory of the old 
Suffering and Dying God, of whom we spoke in the 
first of these studies. It is vividly affected by the ideal | 
‘Righteous Man’ of Plato, who ‘shall be scourged, , 
tortured, bound, his eyes burnt out, and at last, after 


1 Hippolytus, 134, go ff., text in Reitzenstein’s Pormandres, pp. 
83-98. 


198 THE FAILURE OF NERVE IV 


suffering every evil, shall be impaled or crucified ’.* 
But in the main he descends, of his free will or by the 
eternal purpose of the Father, from Heaven through 
the spheres of all the Archontes or Kosmokratores, 
the planets, to save mankind, or sometimes to save the 
fallen Virgin, the Soul, Wisdom, or ‘ the Pearl’.? The 
Archontes let him pass because he is disguised ; they 
do not know him (cf: 1 Cor. ii. 7 ff.). When his work 
is done he ascends to Heaven to sit by the side of the 
Father in glory ; he conquers the Archontes, leads them 
captive in his triumph, strips them of their armour 
(Colvaien orercr. thie previous verse), sometimes even 
crucifies them for ever in their places in the sky.* The 
epistles to the Colossians and the Ephesians are much 
influenced by these doctrines. Paul himself constantly 
uses the language of them, but in the main we find 
him discouraging the excesses of superstition, reform- 
ing, ignoring, rejecting. His Jewish blood was perhaps 
enough to keep him to strict monotheism. Though he 
admits Angels and Archontes, Principalities and Powers, 
he scorns the Elements and he seems deliberately to 
reverse the doctrine of the first and second Man. He 
| \ says nothing about the Trinity of Divine Beings that 
\yas usual in Gnosticism, nothing about the Divine 
1 Republic, 362 a. ’Avacywwdvdrevtw is said to = dvacxoAo7i~w, which 
is used both for ‘impale’ and ‘ crucify’. The two were alternative 
forms of the most slavish and cruel capital punishment, impalement 
being mainly Persian, crucifixion Roman. 
2 See The Hymn of the Soul, attributed to the Gnostic Bardesanes, 
edited by A. A. Bevan, Cambridge, 1897. 


3 Bousset cites Acta Archelai 8, and Epiphanius, Haeres. 66, 32. 
4 Gal. iv.9g; 1 Cor. xv. 21 f., 47; Rom. v. 12-18. 


Iv THE FAILURE OF NERVE 199 


Mother. His mind, for all its vehement mysticism, 
has something of that clean antiseptic quality that 
makes such early Christian works as the Octavius of 
Minucius Felix and the Epistle to Diognetusso infinitely 
refreshing. He 1s certainly one of the great figures in 
Greek literature, but his system lies outside the subject 
of this essay. We are concerned only with those last 
manifestations of Hellenistic religion which probably 
formed the background of his philosophy. It is a 
strange experience, and it shows what queer stuff we 
humans are made of, to study these obscure congrega- 
tions, drawn from the proletariate of the Levant, 
superstitious, charlatan-ridden, and helplessly ignorant, 
who still believed in Gods begetting children of mortal 
mothers, who took the ‘ Word’, the ‘ Spirit ’, and the 
‘Divine Wisdom’, to be persons called by those 
names, and turned the Immortality of the Soul into 
‘the standing up of the corpses’ ;* and to reflect that 
it was these who held the main road of advance 
towards the greatest religion of the western world. 


I have tried to sketch in outline the main forms 
of belief to which Hellenistic philosophy moved or 
drifted. Let me dwell for a few pages more upon the 
characteristic method by which it reached them. It 
may be summed up in one word, Allegory. All 
Hellenistic. philosophy from the first. Stoics- onward 
is permeated by allegory. It is applied to Homer, to 
the religious traditions, to the ancient rituals, to the 
whole world. To Sallustius after the end of our period 


1 4 dvdotacis tov vexpov. Cf. Acts xvil. 32. 


200 THE FAILURE OF NERVE IV 


the whole material world is only a great myth, a thing 
whose value lies not in itself but in the spiritual meaning 
which it hides and reveals. To Cleanthes at the 
beginning of it the Universe was a mystic pageant, 
in which the immortal stars were the dancers and the 
Sun the priestly torch-bearer.* Chrysippus reduced 
the Homeric gods to physical or ethical principles ; and 
Crates, the great critic, applied allegory in detail to 
his interpretation of the all-wise poet.” We possess 
two small but complete treatises which illustrate 
well the results of this tendency, Cornutus epi Jeo 
and the Homertc Allegories of Heraclitus, a brilliant 
little work of the first century B.c. I will not dwell 
upon details: they are abundantly accessible and 
individually often ridiculous. A by-product of the 
same activity is the mystic treatment of language: 
a certain Titan in Hesiod is named Koios. Why? 
Because the Titans are the elements and one of them 
is naturally the element of Kovdrns, the Ionic Greek 
for ‘ Quality’. The Egyptian Isis is derived from 
the root of the Greek eidévar, Knowledge, and the 
Egyptian Osiris from the Greek d6ouos and ipds (‘ holy’ 
and ‘sacred’, or perhaps more exactly ‘lawful’ and 
‘tabu’). Is this totally absurd? I think not. If all 
human language is, as most of these thinkers believed, 
a divine institution, a cup filled to the brim with divine 
meaning, so that by reflecting deeply upon a word 


1 Cleanthes, 538, Arnim; Diels, p. 592, 30. Cf. Philolaus, Diels, 
p. 336f. 

2 See especially the interpretation of Nestor’s Cup, Athenaeus, 
pp- 489 c. ff. 


IV THE FAILURE OF NERVE 201 


a pious philosopher can reach the secret that it holds, 
then there is no difficulty whatever in supposing that 
the special secret held by an Egyptian word may be 
found in Greek, or the secret of a Greek word in Baby- 
lonian. Language is One. The Gods who made all 
these languages equally could use them all, and wind 
them all intricately in and out, for the building up 
of their divine enigma. 

We must make a certain effort of imagination to 
understand this method of allegory. It is not the 
frigid thing that it seems to us. In the first place, we_ 
should remember that, as applied to the ancient litera- 
ture and religious ritual, allegory was at least a vera 
causa—it was a phenomenon which actually existed. 
Heraclitus of Ephesus is an obvious instance. He 
deliberately expressed himself in language which should 
not be understood of the vulgar, and which bore a 
hidden meaning to his disciples. Pythagoras did the 
same. The prophets and religious writers must have 
done so to an even greater extent.1 And we know 
enough of the history of ritual to be sure that a great 
deal of it is definitely allegorical. The Hellenistic Age 
did not wantonly invent the theory of allegory. 

~ And secondly,» we must remember what states of 
mind tend especially to produce this kind of belief. 
They are not contemptible states of mind. It needs 
only a strong idealism with which the facts of experi- 
ence clash, and allegory follows almost of necessity. | 

1 | may refer to the learned and interesting remarks on the Esoteric 

Style in Prof. Margoliouth’s edition of Aristotle’s Poetics. It is not, of 


course, the same as Allegory. 
2960 Cc 


202 THE FAILURE OF NERVE IV 


The facts cannot be accepted as they are. They must 
needs be explained as meaning something different. 
Take an earnest Stoic or Platonist, a man of fervid 
mind, who is possessed by the ideals of his philosophy 
and at the same time feels his heart thrilled by the 
beauty of the old poetry. What is he todo? On one 
side he can find Zoilus, or Plato himself, or the Cynic 
preachers, condemning Homer and the poets without 
remorse, as teachers of foolishness. He can treat poetry 
as the English Puritans treated the stage. But 1s that 
a satisfactory solution? Remember that these genera- 
tions were trained habitually to give great weight to 
the voice of their inner consciousness, and the inner 
consciousness of a sensitive man cries out that any such 
solution is false: that Homer is not a liar, but noble 
and great, as our fathers have always taught us. On 
the other side comes Heraclitus the allegorist. ‘ If 
Homer used no allegories he committed all impieties.’ 
On this theory the words can be allowed to possess all 
their old beauty and magic, but an inner meaning is 
added quite different from that which they bear on 
the surface. It may, very likely, be a duller and less 
poetic meaning; but I am not sure that the verses 
will not gain by the mere process of brooding study 
fully as much as they lose by the ultimate badness of the 
interpretation. Anyhow, that was the road followed. 
The men of whom I speak were not likely to give up 
any experience that seemed to make the world more 
godlike or to feed their spiritual and emotional cravings. 
They left that to the barefooted cynics. They craved 
poetry and they craved philosophy ; if the two spoke 


IV THE FAILURE OF NERVE 203 


like enemies, their words must needs be explained away 
by one who loved both. 

The same process was applied to the world itself. 
Something like it is habitually applied by the religious 
idealists of all ages. A fundamental doctrine of 
Stoicism and most of the idealist creeds was the 
perfection and utter blessedness of the world, ind» 
the absolute fulfilment of the purpose of God. Now 
obviously this belief was not based on experience. The 
poor world, to do it justice amid all its misdoings, has 
never lent itself to any such barefaced deception as 
that. No doubt it shrieked against the doctrine then, 
as loud as it has always shrieked, so that even a Posi- 
donian or a Pythagorean, his ears straining for the 
music of the spheres, was sometimes forced to listen. 
And what was his answer? It is repeated in all the 
literature of these sects. ‘Our human experience is 
so small: the things of the earth may be bad and more 
than bad, but, ah! if you only went beyond the 
Moon! ‘That is where the true Kosmos begins.’ And, 
of course, if we did ever go there, we all know they 
would say it began beyond the Sun. Idealism of a cer- 
tain type will have its way; if hard life produces an 
ounce or a pound or a million tons of fact in the scale 
against it, it merely dreams of infinite millions in its 
own scale, and the enemy is outweighed and smothered. 
I do not wish to mock at these Posidonian Stoics and 
Hermetics and Gnostics and Neo-Pythagoreans. They 
loved goodness, and their faith is strong and even 
terrible. One feels rather inclined to bow down before 
their altars and cry: Magna est Delusio et praevalebit. 


204 THE FAILURE OF NERVE IV 


Yet on the whole one rises from these books with the 
impression that all this allegory and mysticism is bad 
for men.» It may make the emotions sensitive, it cer- 
tainly weakens the understanding. And, of course, in 
this paper I have left out of account many of the 
grosser forms of superstition. In any consideration of 
the balance, they should not be forgotten. 

If a reader of Proclus and the Corpus Hermeticum 
wants relief, he will find it, perhaps, best in the writings 
of a gentle old Epicurean who lived at Oenoanda in 
Cappadocia about a.p. 200. His name was Diogenes." 
His works are preserved, in a fragmentary state, not 
on papyrus or parchment, but on the wall of a large 
portico where he engraved them for passers-by to read. 
He lived in a world of superstition and foolish terror, 
and he wrote up the great doctrines of Epicurus for the 
saving of mankind. | 


‘Being brought by age to the sunset of my life, 
and expecting at any moment to take my departure 
from the world with a glad song for the fullness of my 
happiness, I have resolved, lest 1 be taken too soon, to 
give help to those of good temperament. If one person 
or two or three or four, or any small number you 
choose, were in distress, and | were summoned out 
to help one after another, I would do all in my power 
to give the best counsel to each. But now, as I have 
said, the most of men lie sick, as it were of a pestilence, 
in their false beliefs about the world, and the tale of 
them increases ; for by imitation they take the disease 
from one another, like sheep. And further it is only 
just to bring help to those who shall come after us—for 


1 Published in the Teubner series by William, 1907. 


ll i, es i et 


IV THE FAILURE OF NERVE 205 


they too are ours, though they be yet unborn; and 
love for man commands us also to help strangers who 
may pass by. Since therefore the good message of the 
Book has gone forth to many, I have resolved to make 
use of this wall and to set forth in public the medicine 
of the healing of mankind.’ 


The people of his time and neighbourhood seem to 
have fancied that the old man must have some bad 
motive. They understood mysteries and redemptions 
and revelations. They understood magic and curses. 
But they were puzzled, apparently, by this simple 
message, which only told them to use their reason, 
their courage, and their sympathy, and not to be 
afraid of death or of angry gods. ‘The doctrine was 
condensed into four sentences of a concentrated 
eloquence that make a translator despair: * ‘ Nothing 
to fear in God: Nothing to feel in Death: Good can 
be attained: Evil can be endured.’ 

Of course, the doctrines of this good old man do not 
represent the whole truth. To be guided by one’s 
aversions is always a sign of weakness or defeat; and 
it is as much a failure of nerve to reject blindly for 
fear of being a fool, as to believe blindly for fear of 
missing some emotional stimulus. 

There is no royal road in these matters. I confess 
it seems strange to me as I write here, to reflect that 
at this moment many of my friends and most of my 


q "AdoBov 6 Oeds. “AvaicOyrov 6 Gavaros. 
To dyabov evxrntov. To devov evexxaptépyrov. 
I regret to say that I cannot track this Epicurean ‘ tetractys ’ to its 
source, 


206 THE FAILURE OF NERVE IV 


fellow creatures are, as far as one can judge, quite 
confident that they possess supernatural knowledge. 
Asa rule, each individual belongs to some body which 
_has received in writing the results of a divine revelation. 
I cannot share in any such feeling. The Uncharted 
surrounds us on every side and we must needs have 
some relation towards it, a relation which will depend 
on the general discipline of a man’s mind and the bias 
of his whole character. As far as knowledge and 
conscious reason will go, we should follow resolutely 
their austere guidance. When they cease, as cease they 
must, we must use as best we can those fainter powers 
of apprehension and surmise and sensitiveness by 
which, after all, most high truth has been reached as 
well as most high art and poetry: careful always really 
to seek for truth and not for our own emotional 
satisfaction, careful not to neglect the real needs of men 
and women through basing our life on dreams; and 
remembering above all to walk gently in a world where 
the lights are dim and the very stars wander. 


BiBLioGRAPHIcAL Note 


It is not my purpose to make anything like a systematic bibliography, 
but a few recommendations may be useful to some students who 
approach this subject, as I have done, from the side of classical Greek. 

For Greek Philosophy I have used besides Plato and Aristotle, 
Diogenes Laertius and Philodemus, Diels, Fragmente der V orsokratiker ; 
Diels, Doxographt Graect; von Arnim, Stoicorum V eterum Fragmenta ; 
Usener, Epicurea; also the old Fragmenta Philosophorum of Mullach. 

For later Paganism and Gnosticism, Reitzenstein, Poimandres ; 
Reitzenstein, Die hellenistischen Mysterienreligionen ; Dieterich, Eine 
Mithrasliturgie (also Abraxas, Nekyia, Muttererde, &c.); P. Wend- 


IV THE FAILURE OF NERVE 207 


land, Hellenistisch-Romische Kultur; Cumont, Textes et Monuments 
relatifs aux Mystéres de Mithra (also The Mysteries of Mithra, Chicago, 
1903), and Les Religions Ortentales dans PEmpire Romain; Seeck, 
Untergang der anttken Welt, vol. iii; Philo, de Vita Contemplativa, 
Conybeare ; Gruppe, Griechische Religion und Mythologie, pp. 1458- 
1676; Bousset, Hauptprobleme der Gnosis, 1907, with good biblio- 
graphy in the introduction ; articles by E. Bevan in the Quarterly 
Review, No. 424 (June 1910), and the Hibbert Fournal, xi. 1 
(October 1912). Dokumente der Gnosis, by W. Schultz (Jena, 1910), 
gives a highly subjective translation and reconstruction of most of 
the Gnostic documents: the Corpus Hermeticum is translated into 
English by G. R. S. Meade, Thrice Greatest Hermes, 1906. The 
first volume of Dr. Scott’s monumental edition of the Hermetica 
(Clarendon Press, 1924) has appeared just too late to be used in the 
present volume. 

For Jewish thought before the Christian era Dr. Charles’s Testa- 
ments of the Twelve Patriarchs ; also the same writer’s Book of Enoch, 
and the Religionsgeschichtliche Erklarung des Neuen Testaments by 
Car] Clemen, Giessen, 1909. | 

Of Christian writers apart from the New Testament those that come 
most into account are Hippolytus (fa.p. 250), Refutatio Omnium 
Haeresium, Epiphanius (367-403), Panarton, and Irenaeus (7 A. D. 202), 
Contra Haereses, i, ii. For a simple introduction to the problems 
presented by the New Testament literature | would venture to 
recommend Prof. Bacon’s New Testament, in the Home University 
Library, and Dr. Estlin Carpenter’s First Three Gospels. In such a vast 
literature I dare not make any further recommendations, but for a 
general introduction to the History of Religions with a good and brief 
bibliography I would refer the reader to Salomon Reinach’s Orpheus 
(Paris, 1909; English translation the same year), a book of wide 
learning and vigorous thought. 


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In the last essay we have followed Greek popular 
religion to the very threshold of Christianity, till we 
found not only a soil ready for the seed of Christian 
metaphysic, but a large number of the plants already 
in full and exuberant growth. A complete history 
of Greek religion ought, without doubt, to include at 
least the rise of Christianity and the growth of the 
Orthodox Church, but, of course, the present series of 
studies does not aim at completeness. We will take 
the Christian theology for granted as we took the 
classical Greek philosophy, and will finish with a brief 
glance at the Pagan reaction of the fourth century, 
when the old religion, already full of allegory, mysticism, 
asceticism, and Oriental influences, raised itself for a 
last indignant stand against the all-prevailing deniers 
of the gods. 

This period, however, admits a rather simpler treat- 
ment than the others. It so happens that for the last \ 
period of paganism we actually possess an authoritative 
statement of doctrine, something between a creed and\ 
a catechism. It seems to me a document so singularly 
important and, as far as I can make out, so little known, 
that I shall venture to print it entire. 


212 THE CASTRO TES , Vv 


A creed or catechism is, of course, not at all the same 
thing as the real religion of those who subscribe to it. 
The rules of metre are not the same thing as poetry ; 
the rules of cricket, if the analogy may be excused, are 
not the same thing as good play. Nay, more. A man 
states in his creed only the articles which he thinks 
it right to assert positively against those who think 
otherwise. His deepest and most practical beliefs are 
those on which he acts without question, which have 
never occurred to him as being open to doubt. If you 
take on the one hand a number of persons who have 
accepted the same creed but lived in markedly different 
ages and societies, with markedly different standards 
of thought and conduct, and on the other an equal 
number who profess different creeds but live in the 
same general environment, I think there will probably 
be more real identity of religion in the latter group. 
Take three orthodox Christians, enlightened according 
to the standards of their time, in the fourth, the 
sixteenth, and the twentieth centuries respectively, 
1 think you will find more profound differences of 
religion between them than between a Methodist, 
a Catholic, a Freethinker, and even perhaps a well- 
educated Buddhist or Brahmin at the present day, 
provided you take the most generally enlightened 
representatives of each class. Still, when a student is 
trying to understand the inner religion of the ancients, 
he realizes how immensely valuable a creed or even 
a regular liturgy would be. 

Literature enables us sometimes to approach pretty 
close, in various ways, to the minds of certain of the 


Vv THE LAST PROTEST 2113 


great men of antiquity, and understand how they 
thought and felt about a good many subjects. At 
times one of these subjects is the accepted religion of 
their society ; we can see how they criticized it or 
rejected it. But it is very hard to know from their 
reactions against it what that accepted religion really 
was. Who, for instance, knows Herodotus’s religion? 
He talks in his penetrating and garrulous way, ‘ some- 
times for children and sometimes for philosophers,’ as 
Gibbon puts it, about everything in the world; but 
at the end of his book you find that he has not opened 
his heart on this subject. No doubt his profession 
as a reciter and story-teller prevented him. We can 
see that Thucydides was sceptical; but can we fully 
see what his scepticism was directed against, or where, 
for instance, Nikias would have disagreed with him, 
and where he and Nikias both agreed against us? 

We have, of course, the systems of the great philo- 
sophers—especially of Plato and Aristotle. Better than 
either, perhaps, we can make out the religion of 
M. Aurelius. Amid all the harshness and plainness 
of his literary style, Marcus possessed a gift which has 
been granted to few, the power of writing down what 
was in his heart just as it was, not obscured by 
any consciousness of the presence of witnesses or any 
striving after effect. He does not seem to have tried 
deliberately to reveal himself, yet he has revealed 
himself in that short personal note-book almost as 
much as the great inspired egotists, Rousseau and 
St. Augustine. True, there are some passages in 
the book which are unintelligible to us; that is 


214 THE LAST PROTEST Vv 


natural in a work which was not meant to be read 
by the public; broken flames of the white passion 
that consumed him bursting through the armour of 
his habitual accuracy and self-restraint. 


People fail to understand Marcus, not because of his 
lack of self-expression, but because it is hard for most 
men to breathe at that intense height of spiritual life, 
or, at least, to breathe soberly. They can do it if they 
are allowed to abandon themselves to floods of emotion, 
and to lose self-judgement and self-control. I am often 
rather surprised at good critics speaking of Marcus as 
‘cold’. ‘There is as much intensity of feeling in Ta 
eis €auTdy as in most of the nobler modern books of 
religion, only there is a sterner power controlling it. 
The feeling never amounts to complete self-abandon- 
ment. ‘The Guiding Power’ never trembles upon its 
throne, and the emotion is severely purged of earthly 
dross. ‘That being so, we children of earth respond 
to it less readily. 

Still, whether or no we can share Marcus’s religion, 
we can at any rate understand most of it. But even 
then we reach only the personal religion of a very 
extraordinary man}; we are not much nearer to the 
religion of the average educated person—the back- 
ground against which Marcus, like Plato, ought to stand 
out. I believe that our conceptions of it are really 
very vague and various. Our great-grandfathers 
who read ‘ Tully’s Offices and Ends’ were better in- 
formed than we. But there are many large and 
apparently simple questions about which, even after 


Vv THE LAST PROTEST 215 


reading Cicero’s philosophical translations, scholars 
probably feel quite uncertain. Were the morals of 
Epictetus or the morals of Part V of the Anthology 
most near to those of real life among respectable per- 
sons? Are there not subjects on which Plato himself 
sometimes makes our flesh creep? What are we to feel 
about slavery, about the exposing of children? ‘True, 
slavery was not peculiar to antiquity ; it flourished in 
a civilized and peculiarly humane people of English 
blood till a generation ago. And the history of infanti- 
cide among the finest modern nations is such as to 
make one reluctant to throw stones, and even doubtful 
in which direction to throw them. Still, these great 
facts and others like them have to be understood, and 
are rather hard to understand, in their bearing on the 
religious life of the ancients. 

Points of minor morals again are apt to surprise a 
reader of ancient literature. We must remember, of 
course, that they always do surprise one, in every age of 
history, as soon as its manners are studied in detail. One 
need not go beyond Salimbene’s Chronicle, one need 
hardly go beyond Macaulay’s History, or any of the 
famous French memoirs, to realize that. Was it really 
an ordinary thing in the first century, as Philo seems 
to say, for gentlemen at dinner-parties to black one 
another’s eyes or bite one another’s ears off? ' Or were 
such practices confined to some Smart Set? Or was 
Philo, for his own purposes, using some particular 
scandalous occurrence as if it was typical? 

St. Augustine mentions among the virtues of his 


1 De Vit. Contempl., p. 477 M. 


216 THE LAST PROTEST Vv 


mother her unusual meekness and tact. Although her 
husband had a fiery temper, she never had bruises on 
her face, which made her a rara avis among the matrons 
of her circle.’ Her circle, presumably, included 
Christians as well as Pagans and Manicheans. And 
Philo’s circle can scarcely be considered Pagan. Indeed, 
as for the difference of religion, we should bear in mind 
that, just at the timie we are about to consider, the 
middle of the fourth century, the conduct of the 
Christians, either to the rest of the world or to one 
another, was very far from evangelical. Ammianus 
says that no savage beasts could equal its cruelty ; 
Ammianus was a pagan; but St. Gregory himself says 
it was like Hell. 

I have expressed elsewhere my own general answer 
to this puzzle.? Not only in early Greek times, but 
throughout the whole of antiquity the possibility of all 
sorts of absurd and atrocious things lay much nearer, 
the protective forces of society were much weaker, the 
strain on personal character, the need for real ‘ wisdom 
and virtue ’, was much greater than it is at the present 
day. ‘That is one of the causes that make antiquity so 
interesting. Of course, different periods of antiquity 
varied greatly, both in the conventional standard 
demanded and in the spiritual force which answered 
or surpassed the demand. But, in general, the strong 
governments and orderly societies of modern Europe 
have made it infinitely easier for men of no particular 
virtue to live a decent life, infinitely easier also for 


1 Conf. ix. 9. * Gibbon, chap. xxi, notes 161, 162. 
3 Rise of the Greek Epic, chap. i. 





es 


| 


v THE LAST PROTEST 217 


men of no particular reasoning power or scientific 
knowledge to have a more or less scientific or sane 
view of the world. 

That, however, does not carry us far towards 
solving the main problem: it brings us no nearer to 
knowledge of anything that we may call typically a 
religious creed or an authorized code of morals, in any 
age from Hesiod to M. Aurelius. 


The book which I have ventured to call a Creed or 
Catechism is the work of Sallustius About the Gods and __ 
.the World, a book, I should say, about the length of 
the Scottish Shorter Catechism. It is printed in the 
third volume of Mullach’s Fragmenta Philosophorum ; 
apart from that, the only edition generally acces- 
sible—and that is rare—is a duodecimo published by 
Allatius in 1539. Orelli’s brochure of 1821 seems 
to be unprocurable. 

The author was in all probability that Sallustius. who 
is known USES oe ri ta om are ee eat 
accession, and—a—backer or inspirer of the emperor’s 
efforts to restore the old religion. He was concerned 
in an educational edition of Sophocles—the seven 
selected plays now extant with a commentary. He 
was given the rank of prefect in 362, that of consul 
in 363. One must remember, of course, that in that 
rigorous and ascetic court high rank connoted no pomp 
or luxury. Julian had dismissed the thousand hair- 
dressers, the innumerable cooks and eunuchs of his 
Christian predecessor. It probably brought with it 
only an increased obligation to live on pulse and to do 

2960 E¢ 


218 THE LAST PROTEST Vv 


without such pamperings of the body as fine clothes or . 


warmth or washing. 

_ Julian’s fourth oration, a prose hymn To King 
Sun, mpos “HAtov Baordea, is dedicated to Sallustius ; 
his eighth is a ‘Consolation to Himself upon the 
Departure of Sallustius . (He had been with Julian in 
the wars in Gaul, and was recalled by the jealousy of 
the emperor Constantius.) It is a touching and even 
a noble treatise. ‘The nervous self-distrust which was 
habitual in Julian makes him write always with a certain 
affectation, but no one could mistake the real feeling 
of loss and loneliness that runs through the consolation. 
He has lost his ‘ comrade in the ranks’, and now is 
“ Odysseus left alone’. So he writes, quoting the iad ; 
Sallustius has been carried by God outside the spears 
and arrows: ‘which malignant men were always 
aiming at you, or rather at me, trying to wound me 
through you, and believing that the only way to beat 
me down was by depriving me of the fellowship of 
my true friend and fellow-soldier, the comrade who 
never flinched from sharing my dangers.’ 

One note recurs four times ; he has lost the one man 
to whom he could talk as a brother; the man of 
“guileless and clean free-speech ’,’ who was honest and 
unafraid and able to contradict the emperor freely 
because of their mutual trust. If one thinks of it, 
Julian, for all his gentleness, must have been an alarming 
emperor to converse with. His standard of conduct 
was not only uncomfortably high, it was also a little 
unaccountable. The most correct and blameless court 


1 GdoXos Kal kabapa zappycia. 





= a 


Vv THE LAST PROTEST 219 


officials must often have suspected that their master 
looked upon them as simply wallowing in sin. And that 
feeling does not promote ease or truthfulness. Julian 
compares his friendship with Sallustius to that of Scipio 
and Laelius. People said of Scipio that he only carried 
out what Laelius told him. ‘Is that true of me?’ 
Julian asks himself. ‘ Have I only done what Sallustius 
told me?’ His answer is sincere and beautiful: Kowa 
7a ditwv. It little matters who suggested, and who 
agreed to the suggestion; his thoughts, and any credit 
that came from the thoughts, are his friend’s as much 
as his own. We happen to hear from the Christian 
Theodoret (Hist. iti. 11) that on one occasion when 
Julian was nearly goaded into persecution of the 
Christians, it was Sallustius who recalled him to their 
fixed policy of toleration. 

Sallustius then may be taken to represent in the 
most authoritative way the Pagan reaction of Julian’s 
time, in its final struggle against Christianity. 

_ He was, roughly speaking, a Neo-Platonist. But it is 
not as a professed philosopher that he writes. It is only 
that Neo-Platonism had permeated the whole atmo- 
sphere of the age.t The strife of the philosophical 
sects had almost ceased. Just as Julian’s mysticism 
made all gods and almost all forms of worship into 
one, so his enthusiasm for Hellenism revered, nay, 

1 «Many of his sections come straight from Plotinus: xiv and xv 
perhaps from Porphyry’s Letter to Marcella, an invaluable document 
for the religious side of Neo-Platonism. A few things (prayer to the 
souls of the dead in iv, to the Cosmos in xvii, the doctrine of rvy7 in 1x) 


are definitely un-Plotinian : probably concessions to popular religion.’ 


—E.R.D. 


220 THE LAST PROTEST Vv 


idolized, almost all the great philosophers of the past. 
They were all trying to say the same ineffable thing ; 
all lifting mankind towards the knowledge of God. 
I say ‘almost’ in both cases; for the Christians are 
outside the pale in one domain and the Epicureans 
and a few Cynics in the other. Both had committed 
the cardinal sin; they had denied the gods. They 
are sometimes lumped together as Atheoi. L’athéisme, 
voila Pennemt. 

This may surprise us at first sight, but the explana- 
tion is easy. ‘To Julian the one great truth that 
matters is the presence and glory of the gods. No 
doubt, they are all ultimately one; they are Suvdpets, 
‘ forces,’ not persons, but for reasons above our com- _ 
prehension they are manifest only under conditions 
of form, time,,and personality, and have so been 
revealed and worshipped and partly known by the 
great minds of the past. In Julian’s mind the religious 
emotion itself becomes the thing to live for. Every 
object that has been touched by that emotion is thereby 
glorified and made sacred. Every shrine where men 
have worshipped in truth of heart is thereby a house of 
God. The worship may be mixed up with all sorts of 
folly, all sorts of unedifying practice. Such things — 
must be purged away, or, still better, must be properly _ 
understood. For to the pure all things are pure; and 
the myths that shock the vulgar are noble allegories to 
the wise and reverent. Purge religion from dross, if 
you like ; but remember that you do so at your peril. 
One false step, one self-confident rejection of a thing _ 
which is merely too high for you to grasp, and you are 





Vv THE: CAST PROTEST 221 


darkening the Sun, casting God out of the world. 
And that was just what the Christians deliberately 
did. In many of the early Christian writings denial 
is a much greater element than assertion. The beauti- 
ful Octavius of Minucius Felix (about a. p. 130-60) 
is an example. Such denial was, of course, to our 
judgement, eminently needed, and rendered a great 
service to the world. But to Julian it seemed impiety. 
In other Christian writings the misrepresentation of 
pagan rites and beliefs is decidedly foul-mouthed and 
malicious. Quite apart from his personal wrongs and 
his contempt for the character of Constantius, Julian 
could have no sympathy for men who overturned altars 
and heaped blasphemy on old deserted shrines, defilers 
of every sacred object that was not protected by 
popularity. The most that such people could expect 
from him was that they should not be proscribed 
by law. 

But meantime what were the multitudes of the 
god-fearing to believe? The arm of the state was not 
very strong or effective. Labour as he might to 
supply good teaching to all provincial towns, Julian 
could not hope to educate the poor and ignorant to 
understand Plato and M. Aurelius. For them, he 
seems to say, all that is necessary is that they should 
be pious and god-fearing in their own way. But for 
more or less educated people, not blankly ignorant, and 
yet not professed students of philosophy, there might 
be some simple and authoritative treatise issued— 
a sort of reasoned creed, to lay down ina. convincing 
manner the outlines of the old Hellenic religion, before 


Lp THE LAST PROTEST 


the Christians and Atheists should have swept all fear 
of the gods from off the earth. 


The Christian fathers from Minucius Felix onward 
have shown us what was the most vulnerable point of 
Paganism : the traditional mythology. Sallustius deals 
with it at once. The Akrodtés, or pupil, he says in 
Section 1, needs some preliminary training. He should 
have been well brought up, should not be incurably 
stupid, and should not have been familiarized with 
foolish fables. Evidently the mythology was not to 
be taught to children. He enunciates certain postu- 
lates of religious thought, viz. that God is always good 
and not subject to passion or to change, and then 
proceeds straight to the traditional myths. In the 
first place, he insists that they are what he calls 
‘divine’. That is, they are inspired or have some 
touch of divine truth in them. This is proved by 
the fact that they have been uttered, and sometimes 
invented, by the most inspired poets and. philosophers 
and by the gods themselves in oracles—a very charac- 
teristic argument. 

The myths are all expressions of God and of the 
goodness of God; but they follow the usual method 
of divine revelation, to wit, mystery and allegory. 
The myths state clearly the one tremendous fact that _ 
the Gods are; that is what Julian cared about and 
the Christians denied: what they are the myths 
reveal only to those who have understanding. ‘The 
world itself is a great myth, in which bodies and 





Vv THE LAST PROTEST 223 


inanimate things are visible, souls and minds in- 
visible.’ 

‘But, admitting all this, how comes it that the 
myths are so often absurd and even. immoral?’ For 
the usual purpose of mystery and allegory; in 
order to make people think. The soul that wishes 
to know God must make its own effort; it cannot 
expect simply to lie still and be told. The myths 
by their obvious falsity and absurdity on the surface 
stimulate the mind capable of religion to probe 
deeper. | 

He proceeds to give instances, and chooses at once 
myths that had been for generations the mock of the 
sceptic, and in his own day furnished abundant ammu- 
nition for the artillery of Christian polemic. He takes 
first Hesiod’s story of Kronos swallowing his children ; 
then the Judgement of Paris; then comes a long and 
earnest explanation of the myth of Attis and the 
Mother of the Gods. It is on the face of it a story 
highly discreditable both to the heart and the head 
of those august beings, and though the rites themselves 
do not seem to have been in any way improper, the 
Christians naturally attacked the Pagans and Julian 
personally for countenancing the worship. Sallustius’s 
explanation is taken directly from Julian’s fifth oration 
in praise of the Great Mother, and reduces the myth 
and the ritual to an expression of the adventures of 
the Soul seeking God. 

So much for the whole traditional mythology. It 
has been explained completely away and made sub- 
servient to philosophy and edification, while it can 


224. THE LAST PROTEST Vv 


still be used as a great well-spring of religious emotion. 
For the explanations given by Sallustius and Julian are 
never rationalistic. ‘They never stimulate a spirit of 
scepticism, always a spirit of mysticism and reverence. 
And, lest by chance even this reverent theorizing 
should have been somehow lacking in insight or true 
piety, Sallustius ends with the prayer: ‘ When I say 
these things concerning the myths, may the gods 
themselves and the spirits of those who wrote the 
myths be gracious to me.’ 

He now leaves mythology and turns to the First 
Cause. It must be one, and it must be present in all 
things. ‘Thus, it cannot be Life, for, if it were, all things 
would be alive. By a Platonic argument in which 
he will still find some philosophers to follow him, he 
proves that everything which exists, exists because of 
some goodness in it ; and thus arrives at the conclusion 
that the First Cause is 76 ayadv, the Good. 

The gods are emanations or forces issuing from the 
Good ; the makers of this world are secondary gods ; 
above them are the makers of the makers, above all 
the One. 

Next comes a proof that the world is eternal—a very 
important point of doctrine; next that the soul is 
immortal; next a definition of the workings of Divine 
Providence, Fate, and Fortune—a fairly skilful piece 
of dialectic dealing with a hopeless difficulty. Next 
come Virtue and Vice, and, in a dead and perfunctory 
echo of Plato’s Republic, an enumeration of the good 
and bad forms of human society. ‘The questions which 
vibrated with life in free Athens had become meaning- 





v THE LAST PROTEST 225 


less to a despot-governed world. ‘Then follows more 
adventurous matter. 

First a chapter headed: ‘ Whence Evil things come, 
and that there is no Phusts Kakou—Evil is not a real 
thing.’ ‘It is perhaps best ’, he says, ‘ to observe at once 
that, since the gods are good and make everything, there 
is no positive evil ; there is only absence of good ; just 
as there is no positive darkness, only absence of light.’ 

What we call ‘ evils’ arise only in the activities of 
men, and even here no one ever does evil for the sake of 
evil. ‘One who indulges in some pleasant vice thinks 
the vice bad but his pleasure good ; a murderer thinks 
the murder bad, but the money he will get by it, 
good; one who injures an enemy thinks the injury 
bad, but the being quits with his enemy, good’; and 
soon. ‘The evil acts are all done for the sake of some 
good, but human souls, being very far removed from 
the original flawless divine nature, make mistakes or sins. 
One of the great objects of the world, he goes on to 
explain, of gods, men, and spirits, of religious institutions 
and human laws alike, is to keep the souls from these 
errors and to purge them again when they have fallen. 

Next comes a speculative difficulty. Sallustius has 
called the world ‘ eternal in the fullest sense ’—that is, 
it always has been and always will be. And yet it is 
‘made’ by the gods. How are these statements 
compatible? If it was made, there must have been 
a time before it was made. ‘The answer is ingenious. 
It is not made by handicraft as a table is; it is not 
begotten as a son by a father. It is the result of 
a quality of God just as light is the result of a quality 

2960 F f 


226 THE LAST PROTEST v 


of the sun. The sun causes light, but the light is 
there as soon as the sun is there. ‘The world is 
simply the other side, as it were, of the goodness of God, 
and has existed as long as that goodness has existed. 

Next come some simpler questions about man’s 
relation to the gods. In what sense can we'say that 
the gods are angry with the wicked or are appeased by 
_repentance? Sallustius is quite firm. The gods can- 
not ever be glad—for that which is glad is also sorry ; 
cannot be angry—for anger is a passion ; and obviously 
they cannot be appeased by gifts or prayers. Even 
men, if they are honest, require higher motives than 
that. God is unchangeable, always good, always doing 
good. If we are good, we are nearer to the gods, and 
we feel it ; if we are evil, we are separated further from 
them. It is not they that are angry, it is our sins that 
hide them from us and prevent the goodness of God 
from shining into us. If we repent, again, we do not 
make any change in God; we only, by the conversion- 
of our soul towards the divine, heal our own badness 
and enjoy again the goodness of the gods. ‘To say that 
the gods turn away from the wicked, would be like 
saying that the sun turns away from a blind man. 

Why then do we make offerings and sacrifices to 
the gods, when the gods need nothing and can have 
nothing added to them? We do so in order to have 
more communion with the gods. The whole temple 
service, in fact, is an elaborate allegory, a represen- 
tation of the divine government of the world. 

The custom of sacrificing animals had died out some 
time before this. ‘The Jews of the Dispersion had 





Vv THE LAST PROTEST 227 


given it up long since because the Law forbade any 
such sacrifice outside the Temple.1| When Jerusalem 
was destroyed Jewish sacrifice ceased altogether. ‘The 
Christians seem from the beginning to have generally 
followed the Jewish practice. But sacrifice was in 
itself not likely to continue in a society of large towns. 
It meant turning your temples into very ill-conducted 
slaughter-houses, and was also associated with a great 
deal of muddled and indiscriminate charity.2 One 
might have hoped that men so high-minded and 
spiritual as Julian and Sallustius would have considered 
this practice unnecessary or even have reformed it 
away. But no. It was part of the genuine Hellenic 
tradition ; and no jot or tittle of that tradition should, 
if they could help it, be allowed to die. Sacrifice is 
desirable, argues Sallustius, because it is a gift of life. 
God has given us life, as He has given us all else. We 
must therefore pay to Him some emblematic tithe of 
life. Again, prayers in themselves are merely words ; 
but with sacrifice they are words plus life, Living 
Words. Lastly, we are Life of a sort, and God is Life 
of an infinitely higher sort. ‘To approach Him we need 
always a medium or a mediator ; the medium between 
life and life must needs be life. We find that life in the 


sacrificed animal.® 


1S. Reinach, Orpheus, p. 273 (Engl. trans., p. 185). 

2 See Ammianus, xxii. 12, on the bad effect of Julian’s sacrifices, 
Sacrifice was finally forbidden by the emperor Theodosius in 391. It 
was condemned by Theophrastus, and is said by Porphyry (De Abstinen- 
tia, ii. 11) simply AaPetv THY apxiv éF ddiKias. 

3 Sallustius’s view of sacrifice is curiously like the illuminating 


228 THE LAST PROTEST Vv 


The argument shows what ingenuity these religious 
men had at their command, and what trouble they 
would take to avoid having to face a fact and reform 
a bad system. 

There follows a long and rather difficult argument 
to show that the world is, in itself, eternal. “The 
former discussion on this point had only shown that 
the gods would not* destroy it. This shows that its 
own nature is indestructible. ‘The arguments are 
very inconclusive, though clever, and one wonders 
why the author is at so much pains. Indeed, he is so 
earnest that at the end of the chapter he finds it 
necessary to apologize to the Kosmos in case his 
language should have been indiscreet. The reason, 
I think, is that the Christians were still, as in apostolic 
times, pinning their faith to the approaching end of 
the world by fire. They announced the end of the 
world as near, and they rejoiced in the prospect of its 
destruction. History has shown more than once what 
terrible results can be produced by such beliefs as 
these in the minds of excitable and suffering popula- 


theory of MM. Hubert and Mauss, in which they define primitive 
sacrifice as a medium, a bridge or lightning-conductor, between the 
profane and the sacred. ‘Essai sur la Nature et la Fonction du 
Sacrifice’? (Année Sociologique, ii. 1897-8), since republished in the 
Meélanges d Histoire des Religions, 1909. 

1 Cf. Minucius Felix, Octavius, p. 96, Ouzel (chap. 11, Boenig). 
‘Quid quod toti orbi et ipsi mundo cum sideribus suis minantur 
incendium, ruinam moliuntur?’ ‘The doctrine in their mouths 
became a very different thing from the Stoic theory of the periodic 
re-absorption of the universe in the Divine Element. Ibid., pp. 322 ff. 
(34 Boenig). 





Vv THE LAST PROTEST 229 


tions, especially those of eastern blood. It was widely 
believed that Christian fanatics had from time to time 
actually tried to light fires which should consume the 
accursed world and thus hasten the coming of the 
kingdom which should bring such incalculable rewards 
to their own organization and plunge the rest of man- 
kind in everlasting torment. To any respectable Pagan 
such action was an insane crime made worse by a 
diabolical motive. The destruction of the world, 
therefore, seems to have become a subject of profound 
irritation, if not actually of terror. At any rate the 
doctrine lay at the very heart of the perniciosa 
superstitio, and Sallustius uses his best dialectic 
against it. 

The title of Chapter XVIII has a somewhat pathetic 
ring: *‘ Why are Atheiai’—Atheisms or rejections of 
God—‘ permitted, and that God is not injured there- 
by.’ @eds od Bramrera. ‘ If over certain parts of the 
world there have occurred (and will occur more here- 
after) rejections of the gods, a wise man need not be 
disturbed at that.? We have always. known that the 
human soul was prone to error. God’s providence is 
there ; but we cannot expect all men at all times and 
places to enjoy it equally. In the human body it is 
only the eye that sees the light, the rest of the body is 
ignorant of the light. So are many parts of the earth 
ignorant of God. 

Very likely, also, this rejection of God is a punish- 
ment. Persons who in a previous life have known the 
gods but disregarded them, are perhaps now born, as it 
were, blind, unable to see God; persons who have 


230 THE LAST PROTEST Vv 


committed the blasphemy of worshipping their own 
kings as gods may perhaps now be cast out from the 
knowledge of God. 

Philosophy had always rejected the Man-God, 
especially in the form of King-worship; but op- 
position to Christianity no doubt intensifies the 
protest. 

The last chapter is very short. ‘Souls that have 
lived in virtue, being otherwise blessed and especially 
separated from their irrational part and purged of all 
body, are joined with the gods and sway the whole 
world together with them.’ So far triumphant faith : 
then the after-thought of the brave man who means 
to live his best life even if faith fail him. ‘ But even 
if none of these rewards came to them, still Virtue 
itself and the Joy and Glory of Virtue, and the Life 
that is subject to no grief and no master, would be 
enough to make blessed those who have set themselves 
to live in Virtue and have succeeded.’ 


There the book ends. It ends upon that well-worn 
paradox which, from the second book of the Republic 
onwards, seems to have brought so much comfort to 
the nobler spirits of the ancient world. Strange how 
we moderns cannot rise to it! Weseem simply to lack _ 
the intensity of moral enthusiasm. When we speak of _ 
martyrs being happy on the rack; in the first place we 
rarely believe it, and in the second we are usually 
supposing that the rack will soon be over and that harps 
and golden crowns will presently follow. The ancient — 
moralist believed that the good man was happy then _ 








Vv THE LAST PROTEST 231 


and there, because the joy, being in his soul, was not 
affected by the torture of his body.? 

Not being able fully to feel this conviction, we natu- 
rally incline to think it affected or unreal. But, taking 
the conditions of the ancient world into account, we 
must admit that the men who uttered this belief at 
least understood better than most of us what suffering 
was. Many of them were slaves, many had been 
captives of war. ‘They knew what they were talking 
about. I think, on a careful study of M. Aurelius, 
Epictetus, and some of these Neo-Platonic philosophers, 
that we shall be forced to realize that these men could 
rise to much the same heights of religious heroism as 
the Catholic saints of the Middle Age, and that they 
often did so—if | may use such a phrase—on a purer 
and thinner diet of sensuous emotion, with less 
wallowing in the dust and less delirium. 

Be that as it may, we have now seen in outline the 
kind of religion which ancient Paganism had become 
at the time of its final reaction against Christianity. 
It is a more or less intelligible whole, and succeeds 
better than most religions in combining two great 
appeals. It appeals to the philosopher and the 
thoughtful man as a fairly complete and rational 
system of thought, which speculative and enlightened 
minds in any age might believe without disgrace. 
I do not mean that it is probably true; to me all 
these overpowering optimisms which, by means of a 
few untested a priorz postulates, affect triumphantly 


1 Even Epicurus himself held xav orpeBAoby 6 codds, eivar abrov 
evdatuova. Diog. La. x. 118. See above, end of chap. ili. 


232 THE LAST PROTEST v 


to disprove the most obvious facts of life, seem very 
soon to become meaningless. I conceive it to be no 
comfort at all, to a man suffering agonies of frost-bite, 
to be told by science that cold is merely negative and 
does not exist. So far as the statement is true it is 
irrelevant ; so far as it pretends to be relevant it is 
false. I only mean that a system like that of Sallustius 


is, judged by any~ standard, high, civilized, and 


enlightened. 

At the same time this religion appeals to the ignorant 
and the humble-minded. It takes from the pious 
villager no single object of worship that has turned his 
thoughts heavenwards. It may explain and purge; 
it never condemns or ridicules. In its own eyes that 
was its great glory, in the eyes of history perhaps its 
most fatal weakness. Christianity, apart from its 
positive doctrines, had inherited from Judaism the 
noble courage of its disbeliefs. 

To compare this Paganism in detail with its great 
rival would be, even if I possessed the necessary 
learning, a laborious and unsatisfactory task. But if 
a student with very imperfect knowledge may venture 
a personal opinion on this obscure subject, it seems to 
me that we often look at such problems from a wrong 
angle. Harnack somewhere, in discussing the com- 
parative success or failure of various early Christian 
sects, makes the illuminating remark that the main 
determining cause in each case was not their compara- 
tive reasonableness of doctrine or skill in controversy 
—for they practically never converted one another— 
but simply the comparative increase or decrease of the 








v THE LAST PROTEST 233 


birth-rate in the respective populations. On somewhat 
similar lines it always appears to me that, historically 
speaking, the character of Christianity in these early 
centuries is to be sought not so much in the doctrines 
which it professed, nearly all of which had their roots 
and their close parallels in older Hellenistic or Hebrew 
thought, but in the organization on which it rested. 
For my own part, when I try to understand Chris- 
tianity as a mass of doctrines, Gnostic, Trinitarian, 
Monophysite, Arian and the rest, I get no further. 
When I try to realize it as a sort of semi-secret society 
for mutual help with a mystical religious basis, resting 
first on the proletariates of Antioch and the great 
commercial and manufacturing towns of the Levant, 
then spreading by instinctive sympathy to similar classes 
in Rome and the West, and rising in influence, like 
certain other mystical cults, by the special appeal it 
made to women, the various historical puzzles begin 
to fall into place. Among other things this explains 
the strange subterranean power by which the emperor 
Diocletian was baffled, and to which the pretender 
Constantine had to capitulate; it explains its 
humanity, its intense feeling of brotherhood within its 
own bounds, its incessant care for the poor, and also 
its comparative indifference to the virtues which are 
specially incumbent on a governing class, such as states- 
-manship, moderation, truthfulness, active courage, 
learning, culture, and public spirit. Of course, such 
indifference was only comparative. After the time of 
Constantine the governing classes come into the fold, 
bringing with them. their normal qualities, and there- 
2960 Gg 


234 THE LAST PROTEST v 


after it is Paganism, not Christianity, that must uphold 
the flag of a desperate fidelity in the face of a hostile 
world—a task to which, naturally enough, Paganism was 
not equal. But I never wished to pit the two systems 
against one another. The battle is over, and it is 
poor work to jeer at the wounded and the dead. If 
we read the literature of the time, especially some 
records of the martyrs under Diocletian, we shall at 
first perhaps imagine that, apart from some startling 
exceptions, the conquered party were all vicious and 
hateful, the conquerors, all wise and saintly. ‘Then, 
looking a little deeper, we shall see that this great 
controversy does not stand altogether by itself. As 
in other wars, each side had its wise men and its 
foolish, its good men and its evil. Like other con- 
querors these conquerors were often treacherous and 
brutal; like other vanquished these vanquished have 
been tried at the bar of history without benefit of 
counsel, have been condemned in their absence and 
died with their lips sealed. The polemic literature of 
Christianity is loud and triumphant, the books of the 
Pagans have been destroyed. 

Only an ignorant man will pronounce a violent or 
bitter judgement here. The minds that are now 
tender, timid, and reverent in their orthodoxy would 
probably in the third or fourth century have sided 


with the old gods; those of more daring and puritan — 


temper with the Christians. The historian will only 
try to have sympathy and understanding for both. 
They are all dead now, Diocletian and Ignatius, 
Cyril and. Hypatia, Julian and Basil, Athanasius and 


OE ee — 


V THE LAST PROTEST 235 


Arius: every party has yielded up its persecutors and 
its martyrs, its hates and slanders and aspirations and 
heroisms, to the arms of that great Silence whose 
secrets they all claimed so loudly to have read. Even 
the dogmas for which they fought might seem to be 
dead too. For if Julian and Sallustius, Gregory and 
John Chrysostom, were to rise again and see the world 
as it now is, they would probably feel their personal 
differences melt away in comparison with the vast 
difference between their world and this. They fought 


to the death about this credo and that, but the same 


spirit was in all of them. In the words of one who 
speaks with greater knowledge than mine, ‘ the most 
inward man in these four contemporaries is the same. 
It is the Spirit of the Fourth Century.’ ! 


‘Dieselbe Seelenstimmung, derselbe Spiritualismus’ ; 
also the same passionate asceticism. All through 
antiquity the fight against luxury was a fiercer and 
stronger fight than comes into our modern experience. 
There was not more objective luxury in any period of 
ancient history than there is now; there was never any- 
thing like so much. But there does seem to have been 
more subjective abandonment to physical pleasure and 
concomitantly a stronger protest against it. From 
some time before the Christian era it seems as if the 
subconscious instinct of humanity was slowly rousing 
itself for a great revolt against the long intolerable 
tyranny of the senses over the soul, and by the fourth 
century the revolt threatened to become all-absorbing. 


1 Geffcken in the Neue Fabrbiicher, xxi. 162 f. 


236 THE LAST PROTEST Vv 
The Emperor Julian was probably as proud of his 


fireless cell and the crowding lice in his beard and 
cassock as an average Egyptian monk. The ascetic 
movement grew, as we all know, to be measureless and 
insane. It seemed to be almost another form of lust, 
and to have the same affinities with cruelty. But it 
has probably rendered priceless help to us who come 
afterwards. ‘The insane ages have often done service 
for the sane, the harsh and suffering ages for the gentle 
and well-to-do. | 
Sophrosyné, however we try to translate it, temper- 
ance, gentleness, the spirit that in any trouble thinks 
and is patient, that saves and not destroys, is the right 
spirit. And it is to be feared that none of these fourth- 
century leaders, neither the fierce bishops with their 
homilies on Charity, nor Julian and Sallustius with their 
worship of Hellenism, came very near to that classic 


ideal. ‘To bring back that note of Sophrosyné I will 


venture, before proceeding to the fourth-century Pagan © 


creed, to give some sentences from an earlier Pagan 
prayer. It is cited by Stobaeus from a certain Eusebius, 
a late Ionic Platonist of whom almost nothing is known, 
not even the date at which he lived. But the voice 
sounds like that of a stronger and more sober age. 


‘May I be no man’s enemy,’ it begins, ‘and may 
I be the friend of that which is eternal and abides. 
May I never quarrel with those nearest to me; and 
if I do, may | be reconciled quickly. May I never 


devise evil against any man; if any devise evil against 


me, may I escape uninjured and without the need of — 


1 Mullach, Fragmenta Philosophorum, ii. 7, from Stob, Flor. i. 85. 








v THE LAST PROTEST 237 


hurting him. May I love, seek, and attain only that 
which is good. May I wish for all men’s happiness 
and envy none. May I never rejoice in the ill-fortune 
of one who has wronged me. ... When I have done or 
said what is wrong, may I never wait for the rebuke 
of others, but always rebuke myself until I make 
amends. .. . May I win no victory that harms either 
me or my opponent. ... May I reconcile friends who 
are wroth with one another. May I, to the extent 
of my power, give all needful help to my friends and 
to all who are in want. May I never fail a friend in 
danger. When visiting those in grief may I be able by 
gentle and healing words to soften their pain... . 
May I respect myself. ... May I always keep tame that 
which rages within me. ... May I accustom myself 
to be gentle, and never be angry with people because 
of circumstances. May I never discuss who is wicked 
and what wicked things he has done, but know good 
men and follow in their footsteps.’ 


There is more of it. How unpretending it is and 
yet how searching! And in the whole there is no 
petition for any material blessing, and—most striking 
of all—it is addressed to no personal god. It is pure 
prayer. Of course, to some it will feel thin and cold. 
Most men demand of their religion more outward and 
personal help, more physical ecstasy, a more heady 
atmosphere of illusion. No one man’s attitude 
towards the Uncharted can be quite the same as his 
neighbour’s. In part instinctively, in part super- 
ficially and self-consciously, each generation of man- 
kind reacts against the last. ‘The grown man turns 
from the lights that were thrust upon his eyes in 
childhood. ‘The son shrugs his shoulders at the 


238 THE LAST PROTEST v 


watchwords that thrilled his father, and with varying 
‘degrees of sensitiveness or dullness, of fuller or more 
fragmentary experience, writes out for himself the 
manuscript of his creed. Yet, even for the wildest or 
bravest rebel, that manuscript is only a palimpsest. 
On the surface all is new writing, clean and self- 
assertive. Underneath, dim but indelible in the very 
fibres of the parchment, lie the characters of many 
ancient aspirations and raptures and battles which his 
conscious mind has rejected or utterly forgotten. 
And forgotten things, if there be real life in them, 
will sometimes return out of the dust, vivid to help 
still in the forward groping of humanity. A religious 
system like that of Eusebius or Marcus, or even Sallus- 
tius, was not built up without much noble life and 
strenuous thought and a steady passion for the know- 
ledge of God. Things of that make do not, as a rule, 
die for ever. 





SALLUSTIUS 
‘ON THE GODS AND THE WORLD’ 





SALLUSTIUS 
‘ON THE GODS AND THE WORLD’! 


1. What the Disciple should be ; and concerning 


Common C onceptions. 


Tuose who wish to hear about the Gods should have 
been well guided from childhood, and not habituated 
to foolish beliefs. They should also be in disposition 
good and sensible, that they may properly attend to 
the teaching. 

They ought also to know the Common Conceptions. 
Common Conceptions are those to which all men agree 
as soon as they are asked; for instance, that all God 
is good, free from passion, free from change. For 
whatever suffers change does so for the worse or the 
better: if for the worse, it is made bad; if for the 
better, it must have been bad at first. 


Il. That God 1s unchanging, unbegotten, eternal, 
incorporeal, and not in space. 


Let the disciple be thus. Let the teachings be of 
the following sort. ‘The essences of the Gods never 


1 T translate xoopos generally as ‘ World ’, sometimes as ‘ Cosmos ’, 
It always has the connotation of ‘ divine order’; Wvyx7 always ‘ Soul ’, 
to keep it distinct from fw7, ‘ physical life ’, though often ‘ Life ? would 
be a more natural English equivalent; éyvyovv ‘to animate’; 
ovola sometimes ‘ essence ’, sometimes ‘ being’ (never ‘ substance ’ 
or ‘nature’); vas ‘nature’; copa sometimes ‘ body’, sometimes 
“matter ’. 

2960 Hh 


242 SALLUSTIUS 


came into existence (for that which always is never 
comes into existence; and that exists for ever which 
possesses primary force and by nature suffers nothing) : 
neither do they consist of bodies ; for even in bodies 
the powers are incorporeal. Neither are they con- 
tained by space; for that is a property of bodies. 
Neither are they separate from the First Cause nor 
from one another, just as thoughts are not separate 
from mind nor acts of knowledge from the soul. 


III. Concerning myths; that they are divine, and why. 


We may well inquire, then, why the ancients forsook 
these doctrines and made use of myths. There 1s this 
first benefit from myths, that we have to search and do 
not have our minds idle. 

That the myths are divine can be seen from those 
who have used them. Myths have been used by 
inspired poets, by the best of philosophers, by those 
who established the mysteries, and by the Gods 
themselves in oracles. But why the myths are divine 
it is the duty of Philosophy to inquire. Since all 
existing things rejoice in that which is like them and 
reject that which is unlike, the stories about the Gods 
ought to be like the Gods, so that they may both be 
worthy of the divine essence and make the Gods well 
disposed to those who speak of them: which could only 
be done by means of myths. 

Now the myths represent the Gods themselves and 
the goodness of the Gods—subject always to the 
distinction of the speakable and the unspeakable, the 


‘ON THE GODS AND THE WORLD’ 243 


revealed and the unrevealed, that which is clear and 
that which is hidden: since, just as the Gods have 
made the goods of sense common to all, but those of 
intellect only to the wise, so the myths state the exis- 
tence of Gods to all, but who and what they are only 
to those who can understand. 

They also represent the activities of the Gods. For 
one may call the World a Myth, in which bodies 
and things are visible, but souls and minds hidden. 
Besides, to wish to teach the whole truth about the 
Gods to all produces contempt in the foolish, because 
they cannot understand, and lack of zeal in the good ; 
whereas to conceal the truth by myths prevents the 
contempt of the foolish, and compels the good to 
practise philosophy. 

But why have they put in the myths stories of 
adultery, robbery, father-binding, and all the other 
absurdity? Is not that perhaps a thing worthy of 
admiration, done so that by means of the visible 
absurdity the Soul may immediately feel that the 
words are veils and believe the truth to be a mystery? 


IV. That the species of Myth are five, with 


examples of each. 


Of myths some are theological, some physical, some 
psychic, and again some material, and some mixed from 
these last two. The theological are those myths which 
use no bodily form but contemplate the very essences 
of the Gods: e.g. Kronos swallowing his children. 
Since God is intellectual, and all intellect returns 


244 SALLUSTIUS 


into itself, this myth expresses in allegory the essence 
of God. 

Myths may be regarded physically when they express 
the activities of the Gods in the world: e.g. people 
before now have regarded Kronos as ‘Time, and calling 
the divisions of Time his sons say that the sons are 
swallowed by the father. 

The psychic way is to regard the activities of the 
Soul itself: the Soul’s acts of thought, though they 
pass on to other objects, nevertheless remain inside 
their begetters. | 

The material and last is that which the Egyptians 
have mostly used, owing to their ignorance, believing 
material objects actually to be Gods, and so calling 
them: e.g. they call the Earth Isis, moisture Osiris, 
heat Typhon, or again, water Kronos, the fruits of the 
earth Adonis, and wine Dionysus. 

To say that these objects are sacred to the Gods, 
like various herbs and stones and animals, is possible to 
sensible men, but to say that they are gods is the 
notion of madmen—except, perhaps, in the sense in 
which both the orb of the sun and the ray which comes 
from the orb are colloquially called ‘ the Sun ’.1 

The mixed kind of myth may be seen in many 

1 e, g. when we say ‘ The sun is coming in through the window ’, 
or in Greek éSaipvns nKwv éx Tod HAlov, Plat. Rep. 516 £. ‘This appears 
to mean that you can loosely apply the term ‘ Osiris? both to (i) the 
real Osiris and (ii) the corn which comes from him, as you can apply 
the name ‘ Sun’ both to (i) the real orb and (11) the ray that comes 
from the orb. However, Julian, Or. v, on the Sun suggests a different 


view—that both the orb and the ray are mere effects and symbols of 
the true spiritual Sun, as corn is of Osiris. 


‘ON THE GODS AND THE WORLD’ 245 


instances: for example they say that in a banquet of 
the Gods Discord threw down a golden apple; the 
goddesses contended for it, and were sent by Zeus to 
Paris to be judged ; Paris saw Aphrodite to be beautiful 
and gave her the apple. Here the banquet signifies the 
hyper-cosmic powers of the Gods; that is why they 
are all together. ‘The golden apple is the world, which, 
being formed out of opposites, is naturally said to 
be ‘ thrown by Discord’. The different Gods bestow 
different gifts upon the world and are thus said to 
‘contend for the apple’. And the soul which lives 
according to sense—for that is what Paris is—not seeing 
the other powers in the world but only beauty, declares 
that the apple belongs to Aphrodite. 

Theological myths suit philosophers, physical and 
psychic suit poets, mixed suit religious initiations, since 
every initiation aims at uniting us with the World and 
the Gods. 

To take another myth, they say that the Mother 
of the Gods seeing Attis lying by the river Gallus 
fell in love with him, took him, crowned him with 
her cap of stars, and thereafter kept him with her. 
He fell in love with a nymph and left the Mother to 
live with her. For this the Mother of the Gods made 
Attis go mad and cut off his genital organs and leave 
them with the Nymph, and then return and dwell 
with her. 

Now the Mother of the Gods is the principle that 
generates life ; that is why she is called Mother. Attis 
is the creator of all things which are born and die; 
that is why he is said to have been found by the river 


246 SALLUSTIUS 


Gallus. For Gallus signifies the Galaxy, or Milky Way, 
the point at which body subject to passion begins." 
Now as the primary gods make perfect the secondary, 
the Mother loves Attis and gives him celestial powers. 
That is what the cap means. Attis loves a nymph: 
the nymphs preside over generation, since all that is 
generated is fluid. But since the process of generation 
must be stopped somewhere, and not allowed to 
generate something worse than the worst, the Creator 
who makes these things casts away his generative 
powers into the creation and 1s joined to the gods again. 
Now these things never happened, but always are. And 
Mind sees all things at once, but Reason (or Speech) 
expresses some first and others after. Thus, as the myth 
is in accord with the Cosmos, we for that reason keep 
a festival imitating the Cosmos, for how could we 
attain higher order? 

And at first we ourselves, having fallen from heaven 
and living with the Nymph, are in despondency, and 
abstain from corn and all rich and unclean food, for | 
both are hostile to the soul. Then comes the cutting of 
the tree and the fast, as though we also were cutting 
off the further process of generation. After that the 
feeding on milk, as though we were being born again; 
after which come rejoicings and garlands and, as it 
were, a return up to the Gods. 

The season of the ritual is evidence to the truth of 
these explanations. ‘The rites are performed about 


1 dpyeoOar Mr. L. W. Hunter, épyerfac MS. Above the Milky 
Way there is no such body, only cpa drabés. Cf. Macrob, in Soman. 
DEPP Mito 





‘ON THE GODS AND THE WORLD’ 247 


the Vernal Equinox, when the fruits of the earth are 
ceasing to be produced, and day is becoming longer 
than night, which applies well to Spirits rising higher. 
(At least, the other equinox is in mythology the time 
of the Rape of Koré, which is the descent of the 
souls.) 

May these explanations of the myths find favour in 
the eyes of the Gods themselves and the souls of those 
who wrote the myths. | 


V. On the First Cause. 


Next in order comes knowledge of the First Cause 
and the subsequent orders of the gods, then the 
nature of the world, the essence of intellect and of 
soul, then Providence, Fate, and Fortune, then to 
see Virtue and Vice and the various forms of social 
constitution good and bad that are formed from them, 
and from what possible source Evil came into the 
world. 

Each of these subjects needs many long discussions ; 
but there is perhaps no harm in stating them briefly, 
so that a disciple may not be completely ignorant 
about them. 

It is proper to the First Cause to be One-for 
unity precedes multitude—and to surpass all things 
in power and goodness. Consequently all things must 
partake of it. For owing to its power nothing else 
can hinder it, and owing to its goodness it will not 
hold itself apart. 

If the First Cause were Soul, all things would possess 


248 SALLUSTIUS 


Soul. If it were Mind, all things would possess Mind. 
If it were Being, all things would partake of Being. 
And seeing this quality (i.e. Being) in all things, some 
men have thought that it was Being. Now if things 
simply were, without being good, this argument would 
be true, but if things that are are because of their 
goodness, and partake in the good, the First thing must 
needs be both beyond-Being and good. It is strong 
evidence of this that noble souls despise Being for the 
sake of the good, when they face death for their country 
or friends or for the sake of virtue.—After this inex- 
pressible power come the orders of the Gods. 


VI. On Gods Cosmic and Hypercosmic. 


Of the Gods some are of the world, Cosmic, and 
some above the world, Hypercosmic. By the Cosmic 
I mean those who make the Cosmos. Of the Hyper- 
cosmic Gods some create Essence, some Mind, and 
some Soul. Thus they have three orders; all of 
which may be found in treatises on the subject. 

Of the Cosmic Gods some make the World be, others 
animate it, others harmonize it, consisting as it does 
of different elements; the fourth class keep it when 
harmonized. 

These are four actions, each of which has a beginning, 
middle, and end, consequently there must be twelve 
gods governing the world. 

Those who make the world are Zeus, Poseidon, and 
Hephaistos ; those who animate it are Demeter, Hera, 
and Artemis; those who harmonize it are Apollo, 


‘ON THE GODS AND THE WORLD’ 249 


Aphrodite, and Hermes ; those who watch over it are 
Hestia, Athena, and Ares. 

One can see secret suggestions of this in their images. 
Apollo tunes a lyre; Athena is armed; Aphrodite is 
naked (because harmony creates beauty, and beauty 
in things seen is not covered). 

While these twelve in the primary sense possess the 
world, we should consider that the other gods are 
contained in these. Dionysus in Zeus, for instance, 
Asklepios in Apollo, the Charites in Aphrodite. 

We can also discern their various spheres: to Hestia 
belongs the Earth, to Poseidon water, to Hera air, to 
Hephaistos fire. And the six superior spheres to the 
gods to whom they are usually attributed. For 
Apollo and Artemis are to be taken for the Sun and 
Moon, the sphere of Kronos should be attributed to 
Demeter, the ether to Athena, while the heaven is 
common to all. Thus the orders, powers, and spheres 
of the Twelve Gods have been explained and celebrated 
in hymns. 


VII. On the Nature of the World and tts 
Eterntty. 


The Cosmos itself must of necessity be indestructible 
and uncreated. Indestructible because, suppose it 
destroyed: the only possibility is to make one better 
than this or worse or the same or a chaos. If worse, 
the power which out of the better makes the worse 
must be bad. If better, the maker who did not make 
the better at first must be imperfect in power. Ifthe 

2960 I1 


250 SALLUSTIUS 


same, there will be no use in making it; if a chaos... 
it is impious even to hear such a thing suggested. These 
reasons would suffice to show that the World is also 
uncreated: for if not destroyed, neither is it created. 
Everything that is created is subject to destruction. 
And further, since the Cosmos exists by the goodness of 
God it follows that God must always be good and the 
world exist. Just as light coexists with the Sun and 
with fire, and shadow coexists with a body. 

Of the bodies in the Cosmos, some imitate Mind 
and move in orbits; some imitate Soul and move in 
a straight line, fire and air upward, earth and water 
downward. Of those that move in orbits the fixed 
sphere goes from the east, the Seven from the west. 
(This is so for various causes, especially lest the creation 
should be imperfect owing to the rapid circuit of the 
spheres.') 

The movement being different, the nature of the 
bodies must also be different; hence the celestial 
body does not burn or freeze what it touches, or do 
anything else that pertains to the four elements.? 

And since the Cosmos is a sphere—the zodiac proves 
that—and in every sphere ‘down’ means ‘ towards 
the centre’, for the centre is farthest distant from 
every point, and heavy things fall ‘ down’ and fall to 
the earth <it follows that the Earth is in the centre 
of the Cosmos). bh 


1 i. e.if the Firmament or Fixed Sphere moved in the same direction 
as the seven Planets, the speed would become too great. On the 
circular movement cf. Plot. Eun. ii. 2. 

2 The fire of which the heavenly bodies are made is the réuarov 
cua, matter, but different from earthly matter. See p. 170. 


‘ON THE GODS AND THE WORLD’ 251 


All these things are made by the Gods, ordered by 
Mind, moved by Soul. About the Gods we have 
spoken already. 


VIII. On Mind and Soul, and that the latter 


1s immortal. 


There is a certain force,’ less primary than Being 
but more primary than the Soul, which draws its 
existence from Being and completes the Soul as the 
Sun completes the eyes. Of Souls some are rational 
and immortal, some irrational and mortal. The 
former are derived from the first Gods, the latter 
from the secondary. 

First, we must consider what soul is. It is, then, 
that by which the animate differs from the inanimate. 
The difference lies in motion, sensation, imagination, 
intelligence. Soul, therefore, when irrational, is the life 
of sense and imagination; when rational, it is the life 
which controls sense and imagination and uses reason. 

The irrational soul depends on the affections of 
the body ; it feels desire and anger irrationally. The 
rational soul both, with the help of reason, despises the 
body, and, fighting against the irrational soul, produces 
either virtue or vice, according as it is victorious or 
defeated. 

It must be immortal, both because it knows the 
gods (and nothing mortal knows ®? what 1s immortal), it 

1 Proclus, Elem. Theol. xx, calls it 4 voepa dicots, Natura Intel- 
lectualis. There are four degrees of existence: lowest of all, Bodies ; 


above that, Soul; above all Souls, this ‘ Intellectual Nature’; above 
that, The One. 2 i.e. in the full sense of Gndsis, 


252 SALLUSTIUS 


looks down upon human affairs as though it stood out- 
side them, and, like an unbodied thing, it is affected in 
the opposite way to the body. For while the body is 
young and fine, the soul blunders, but as the body grows 
old it attains its highest power. Again, every good 
soul uses mind; but no body can produce mind: for 
how should that which is without mind produce mind? 
Again, while Soul uses the body as an instrument, it is 
not in it; just as the engineer is not in his engines 
(although many engines move without being touched 
by any one). And if the Soul is often made to err by 
the body, that is not surprising. For the arts cannot 
perform their work when their instruments are spoilt. 


{X. On Providence, Fate, and Fortune. 


This is enough to show the Providence of the Gods. 
For whence comes the ordering of the world, if there 
is no ordering power? And whence comes the fact 
that all things are for a purpose: e.g. irrational soul 
that there may be sensation, and rational that the 
earth may be set in order? 

But one can deduce the same result from the evi- 
dences of Providence in nature: e.g. the eyes have 
been made transparent with a view to seeing; the 
nostrils are above the mouth to distinguish bad-smelling 
foods ; the front teeth are sharp, to cut food, the back 
teeth broad to grind it. And we find every part of 
every object arranged on a similar principle. It is 
impossible that there should be so much providence 
in the last details, and none in the first principles. Then 


‘ON THE GODS AND THE WORLD’ 253 


the arts of prophecy and of healing, which are part of 
the Cosmos, come of the good providence of the gods. 

All this care for the world, we must believe, is taken 
by the Gods without any act of will or labour. As 
bodies which possess some power produce their effects 
by merely existing : e.g. the sun gives light and heat by 
merely existing ; so, and far more so, the Providence 
of the Gods acts without effort to itself and for the 
good of the objects of its forethought. This solves 
the problems of the Epicureans, who argue that what 
is Divine neither has trouble itself nor gives trouble to 
others. 

The incorporeal providence of the Gods, both for 
bodies and for souls, is of this sort; but that which 
is of bodies and in bodies is different from this, and is 
called Fate, Heimarmené, because the chain of causes 
(Heirmos) is more visible in the case of bodies; and 
it is for dealing with this Fate that the science of 
* Mathematic ’ has been discovered.' 

Therefore, to believe that human things, especially 
their material constitution, are ordered not only by 
celestial beings but by the Celestial Bodies, is a 
reasonable and true belief. Reason shows that health 
and sickness, good fortune and bad fortune, arise 
according to our deserts from that source. But to 
attribute men’s acts of injustice and lust to Fate, is 
to make ourselves good and the Gods bad. Unless by 
chance a man meant by such a statement that in 
general all things are for the good of the world and for 
those who are in a natural state, but that bad educa- 


1 i.e. Astrology, dealing with the ‘ Celestial Bodies ’. 


254 | SALLUSTIUS 


tion or weakness of nature changes the goods of Fate for 
the worse. Just as it happens that the Sun, which 1s 
good for all, may be injurious to persons with ophthal- 
mia or fever. Else why do the Massagetae eat their 
fathers, the Hebrews practise circumcision, and the 
Persians preserve rules of rank? Why do astrologers, 
while calling Saturn and Mars ‘ malignant ’, proceed 
to make them good, attributing to them philosophy 
and royalty, generalships and treasures? And if they 
are going to talk of triangles and squares, it is absurd 
that gods should change their natures according to their 
position in space, while human virtue remains the same 
everywhere. Also the fact that the stars predict high 
or low rank for the father of the person whose horoscope 
is taken, teaches that they do not always make things 
happen but sometimes only indicate things. For how 
could things which preceded the birth depend upon 
the birth? 

Further, as there is Providence and Fate concerned 
with nations and cities, and also concerned with each 
individual, so there is also Fortune, which should 
next be treated. That power of the gods which orders 
for the good things which are not uniform, and which 
happen contrary to expectation, 1s commonly called 
Fortune, and it is for this reason that the goddess is 
especially worshipped in public by cities; for every 
city consists of elements which are not uniform. For- 
tune has power beneath the moon, since above the 
moon no single thing can happen by fortune. 

If Fortune makes a wicked man prosperous and 

Ch Tita a4. 


‘ON THE GODS AND THE WORLD’ 255 


a good man poor, there is no need to wonder. For 
the wicked regard wealth as everything, the good as 
nothing. And the good fortune of the bad cannot 
take away their badness, while virtue alone will be 
enough for the good. 


X. Concerning Virtue and Vice. 


The doctrine of Virtue and Vice depends on that of 
the Soul. When the irrational soul enters into the 
body and immediately produces Fight and Desire, 
the rational soul, put in authority over all these, makes 
the soul tripartite, composed of Reason, Fight, and. 
Desire. Virtue in the region of Reason is Wisdom, 
in the region of Fight is Courage, in the region of 
Desire it is Temperance; the virtue of the whole 
Soul is Righteousness. It is for Reason to judge 
what is right, for Fight in obedience to Reason 
to despise things that appear terrible, for Desire to 
pursue not the apparently desirable, but, that which 
is with Reason desirable. When these things are so, we 
have a righteous life; for righteousness in matters of 
property is but a small part of virtue. And thus we 
shall find all four virtues in properly trained men, but 
among the untrained one may be brave and unjust, 
another temperate and stupid, another prudent and 
unprincipled. Indeed these qualities should not be 
called Virtues when they are devoid of Reason and 
imperfect and found in irrational beings. Vice should 
be regarded as consisting of the opposite elements. In 
Reason it is Folly, in Fight, Cowardice, in Desire, 
Intemperance, in the whole soul, Unrighteousness. 


256 SALLUSTIUS 


The virtues are produced by the right social organi- 
zation and by good rearing and education, the vices by 
the opposite. | 


XI. Concerning right and wrong Social Organization.‘ 


Constitutions also depend on the tripartite nature of 
the Soul. The rulers are analogous to Reason, the 
soldiers to Fight, the common folk to Desires. 

Where all things are done according to Reason and 
the best man in the nation rules, it is a Kingdom ; 
where more than one rule according to Reason and 
Fight, it is an Aristocracy; where the government is 
according to Desire and offices depend on money, that 
constitution is called a Timocracy. The contraries 
are: to Kingdom tyranny, for Kingdom does all 
things with the guidance of reason and tyranny 
nothing ; to Aristocracy oligarchy, when not the best 
people but a few of the worst are rulers ; to Timocracy 
democracy, when not the rich but the common folk 
possess the whole power. 


XII. The origin of evil things; and that there 


1s no positive evtl. 


The Gods being good and making all things, how 
do evils exist in the world? Or perhaps it is better first 
to state the fact that, the Gods being good and making 
all things, there is no positive evil, it only comes by 


1 [This section is a meagre reminiscence of Plato’s discussion in 
Repub. viii. The interest in politics and government had died out 
with the loss of political freedom. ] 


‘ON THE GODS AND THE WORLD’ 257 


absence of good ; just as darkness itself does not exist, 
but only comes about by absence of light. 

If Evil exists it must exist either in Gods or minds 
or souls or bodies. It does not exist in any god, for 
all god is good. If any one speaks of a ‘ bad mind’ 
he means a mind without mind. If ofa bad soul, he 
will make soul inferior to body, for no body in itself 
is evil. If he says that Evil is made up of soul and 
body together, it is absurd that separately they should . 
not be evil, but joined should create evil. 

Suppose it is said that there are evil spirits :—if they 
have their power from the gods, they cannot be evil ; 
if from elsewhere, the gods do not make all things. 
If they do not make all things, then either they wish 
to and cannot, or they can and do not wish; neither 
of which is consistent with the idea of God. We may 
see, therefore, from these arguments, that there is no 

ositive evil in the world. 
~"/ Itisin the activities of men that the evils appear, and 
that not of all men nor always. And as to these, if 
men sinned for the sake of evil, Nature itself would be 
evil. But if the adulterer thinks his adultery bad but 
his pleasure good, and the murderer thinks the murder 
bad but the money he gets by it good, and the man 
who does evil to an enemy thinks that to do evil is bad 
but to punish his enemy good, and if the soul commits 
all its sins in that way, then the evils are done for the 
sake of goodness. (In the same way, because in a given 
place light does not exist, there comes darkness, which 
has no positive existence.) The soul sins therefore 
because, while aiming at good, it makes mistakes about 
2960 Kk 


258 SALLUSTIUS 


the good, because it is not Primary Essence. And we 
see many things done by the Gods to prevent it from 
making mistakes and to heal it when it has made them. 
Arts and sciences, curses and prayers, sacrifices and 
initiations, laws and constitutions, judgements and 
punishments, all came into existence for the sake of 
preventing souls from sinning ; and when they are gone 
forth from the body gods and spirits of purification 
cleanse them of their sins. 


XIII. How things eternal are said to ‘be made’ 
(yiyveoOa). 


Concerning the Gods and the World and human 
things this account will suffice for those who are not 
able to go through the whole course of philosophy but 
yet have not souls beyond help. 

It remains to explain how these objects were never 
made and are never separated one from another, since 
we ourselves have said above that the secondary sub- 
stances were ‘ made’ by the first. 

Everything made is made either by art or by a 
physical process or according to some power.’ Now in 
art or nature the maker must needs be prior to the 
made: but the maker, according to power, constitutes 
the made absolutely together with itself, since its 
power is inseparable from it; as the sun makes light, 
fire makes heat, snow makes cold. 


Now if the Gods make the world by art, they do 


1 xara Svvapwv, secundum potentiam quandam ; i. e. in accordance 


with some indwelling ‘ virtue ’ or quality. 


‘ON THE GODS AND THE WORLD’ 259 


not make it be, they make it be such as it is. For all 
art makes the form of the object. What therefore 
makes it to be? 

If by a physical process, how in that case can the 
maker help giving part of himself to the made? As 
the Gods are incorporeal, the World ought to be 
incorporeal too. Ifit were argued that the Gods were 
bodies, then where would the power of incorporeal 
things come from? And if we were to admit it, it would 
follow that when the world decays, its maker must be 
decaying too, if he is a maker by physical process. 

If the Gods make the world neither by art nor by 
physical process, it only remains that they make it 
by power. Everything so made subsists together with 
that which possesses the power. Neither can things 
so made be destroyed, except the power of the maker 
be taken away: so that those who believe in the 
destruction of the world, either deny the existence 
of the gods, or, while admitting it, deny God’s 
power. 

Therefore he who makes all things by his own 
power makes all things subsist together with himself. 
And since his power is the greatest power he must 
needs be the maker not only of men and animals, but 
of Gods, men, and spirits.1. And the further removed 
the First God is from our nature, the more powers 
there must be between us and him. For all things that 
are very far apart have many intermediate points 
between them. 


1 The repetition of dvOpwrovs in this sentence seems to be a 
mistake. 


260 SALLUSTIUS 


XIV. In what sense, though the Gods never change, 
they are said to be made angry and appeased. 


If any one thinks the doctrine of the unchangeable- 
ness of the Gods is reasonable and true, and then 
wonders how it is that they rejoice in the good and 
reject the bad, are angry with sinners and become 
propitious when appeased, the answer is as follows: 
God does not rejoice—for that which rejoices also 
grieves; nor is he angered—for to be angered is a 
passion ; nor is he appeased by gifts—if he were, he 
would be conquered by pleasure. 

It is impious to suppose that the Divine is affected 
for good or ill by human things. \The Gods are 
always good and always do good and never harm, being 
always in the same state and like themselves. ‘The 
truth simply is that, when we are good, we are joined 
to the Gods by our likeness to them ; when bad, we are 
separated from them by our unlikeness.) And when 
we live according to virtue we cling to the gods, and ~ 
when we become evil we make the gods our enemies— 
not because they are angered against us, but because 
‘our sins prevent the light of the gods from shining 
upon us, and put us in communion with spirits of 
punishment. And if by prayers and sacrifices we find 
forgiveness of sins, we do not appease or change the 
gods, but by what we do and by our turning towards 
the Divine we heal our own badness and so enjoy again 
the goodness of the gods. To say that God turns 
away from the evil is like saying that the sun hides 
himself from the blind. 


‘ON THE GODS AND THE WORLD’ 261 


XV. Why we give worship to the Gods when 
they need nothing. 


This solves the question about sacrifices and other 
rites performed to the Gods. ‘The Divine itself is 
without needs, and the worship is paid for our own 
benefit. The providence of the Gods reaches every- 
where and needs only some congruity * for its reception. 
All congruity comes about by representation and 
likeness ; for which reason the temples are made in 
representation of heaven, the altar of earth, the images 
of life (that is why they are made like living things), the 
prayers of the element of thought, the mystic letters ” 
of the unspeakable celestial forces, the herbs and stones 
of matter, and the sacrificial animals of the irrational 
life in us. 

From all these things the Gods gain nothing ; what 
gain could there be to God? It is we who gain some 
communion with them. 


XVI. Concerning sacrifices and other worships, that we 
benefit man by them, but not the gods. 


I think it well to add some remarks about sacrifices. 
In the first place, since we have received everything 
from the gods, and it is right to pay the giver some 
tithe of his gifts, we pay such a tithe of possessions 
in votive offerings, of bodies in gifts of <hair and) 
adornment, and of life in sacrifices. ‘Then secondly, 
prayers without sacrifices are only words, with sacri- 


1 émirndevorys. 2 On the mystic letters see above, p. 175. 


262 SALLUSTIUS 


fices they are live words; the word gives meaning 
to the life, while the life animates the word. Thirdly, 
the happiness of every object is its own perfection ; 
and perfection for each is communion with its own 
cause. For this reason we pray for communion with 
the Gods. Since, therefore, the first life is the life of 
the gods, but human life is also life of a kind, and 
human life wishes for communion with divine life, 
a mean term is needed. For things very far apart 
cannot have communion without a mean term, and the 
mean term must be like the things joined; therefore 
the mean term between life and life must be life. 
That is why men sacrifice animals; only the rich do 
so now, but in old days everybody did, and that not 
indiscriminately, but giving the suitable offerings to 
each god together with a great deal of other worship. 
Enough of this subject. 


XVII. That the World is by nature Eternal. 


We have shown above that the gods will not destroy 
the world. It remains to show that its nature is 
indestructible. 

Everything that is destroyed is either destroyed by 
itself or by something else. If the world is destroyed 
by itself, fire must needs burn itself and water dry 
itself. If by something else, it must be either by a 
body or by something incorporeal. By something 
incorporeal is impossible; for incorporeal things 
preserve bodies—nature, for instance, and soul—and 
nothing is destroyed by a cause whose nature is to 


‘ON THE GODS AND THE WORLD’ 263 


preserve it. If it is destroyed by some body, it must 
be either by those which exist or by others. 

If by those which exist: then either those moving 
in a straight line must be destroyed by those that 
revolve, or vice versa. But those that revolve have 
no destructive nature; else, why do we never see 
anything destroyed from that cause? Nor yet can 
those which are moving straight touch the others ; 
else, why have they never been able to do so yet? 

But neither can those moving straight be destroyed 
by one another: for the destruction of one is the 
creation of another; and that is not to be destroyed 
but to change. 

But if the World is to be destroyed by other bodies 
than these it is impossible to say where such bodies 
are or whence they are to arise. 

Again, everything destroyed is destroyed either in 
form or matter. (Form is the shape of a thing, matter 
the body.) Now if the form is destroyed and the 
matter remains, we see other things come into being. 
If matter is destroyed, how is it that the supply has 
not failed in all these years? 

If when matter is destroyed other matter takes its 
place, the new matter must come either from some- 
thing that is or from something that is not. If from 
that-which-is, as long as that-which-is always remains, 
matter always remains. But if that-which-is is de- 
stroyed, such a theory means that not the World only 
but everything in the universe is destroyed. 

If again matter comes from that-which-is-not : in 
the first place, it is impossible for anything to come 


264 SALLUSTIUS 


from that which is not ; but suppose it to happen, and 
that matter did arise from that which is not; then, 
as long as there are things which are not, matter will 
exist. For I presume there can never be an end of 
things which are not. 

If they say that matter <will become) formless: in 
the first place, why does this happen to the world as a 
whole when it does not happen to any part? Secondly, 
by this hypothesis they do not destroy the being of 
bodies, but only their beauty. 

Further, everything destroyed is either resolved into 
the elements from which it came, or else vanishes into 
not-being. If things are resolved into the elements 
from which they came, then there will be others: else 
how did they come into being at all? If that-which-is 
is to depart into not-being, what prevents that happen- 
ing to God himself? (Which is absurd.) Or if God’s 
power prevents that, it is not a mark of power to be © 
able to save nothing but oneself. And it is equally 
impossible for that-which-is to come out of nothing 
and to depart into nothing. 

Again, if the World is destroyed, it must needs either 
be destroyed according to Nature or against Nature. 
Against Nature is impossible, for that which is against 
Nature is not stronger than Nature.’ If according to 
Nature, there must be another Nature which changes 
the Nature of the World: which does not appear. 

Again, anything that is naturally destructible we 
can ourselves destroy. But no one has ever destroyed 


or altered the round body of the World. And the 


1 The text here is imperfect : I have followed Mullach’s correction, 





*ON THE GODS AND THE WORLD’ 265 


elements, though they can be changed, cannot be 
destroyed. Again, everything destructible is changed 
by time and grows old. But the world through all 
these years has remained utterly unchanged. 

Having said so much for the help of those who feel 
the need of very strong demonstrations, I pray the 
World himself to be gracious to me. 


XVIII. W hy there are rejections of God, and that 
God 15 not inqured. 


Nor need the fact that rejections of God have taken 
place in certain parts of the earth and will often 
take place hereafter, disturb the mind of the wise : both 
because these things do not affect the gods, just as we 
saw that worship did not benefit them; and because 
the soul, being of middle essence, cannot be always 
right; and because the whole world cannot enjoy 
the providence of the gods equally, but some parts 
may partake of it eternally, some at certain times, some 
in the primal manner, some in the secondary. Just 
as the head enjoys all the senses, but the rest of the 
body only one. 

For this reason, it seems, those who ordained 
Festivals ordained also Forbidden Days, in which 
some temples lay idle, some were shut, some had their 
adornment removed, in expiation of the weakness of 
our nature. 

It is not unlikely, too, that the rejection of God is 
a kind of punishment : we may well believe that those 
who knew the gods and neglected them in one life may 

2960 Tk 


266 SALLUSTIUS 


in another life be deprived of the knowledge of them 
altogether. Also those who have worshipped their 
own kings as gods have deserved as their punishment 


to lose all knowledge of God. 


XIX. Why sinners are not punished at once. 


There is no need to be surprised if neither these 
sins nor yet others bring immediate punishment upon 
sinners. For it is not only Spirits! who punish the 
soul, the Soul brings itself to judgement: and also it 
is not right for those who endure for ever to attain 
everything in a short time: and also, there is need of 
human virtue. If punishment followed instantly upon 
sin, men would act justly from fear and have no virtue. 

Souls are punished when they have gone forth from 
the body, some wandering among us, some going to 
hot or cold places of the earth, some harassed by 
Spirits. Under all circumstances they suffer with the 
irrational part of their nature, with which they also 
sinned. For its sake * there subsists that shadowy body 
which is seen about graves, especially the graves of evil 
livers. 


XX. On Transmigration of Souls, and how Souls are 
said to migrate into brute beasts. 
If the transmigration of a soul takes place into a 


rational being, it simply becomes the soul of that body. 
But if the soul migrates into a brute beast, it follows 


1 GalLoves. 
2 i.e. that it may continue to exist and satisfy justice. 


‘ON THE GODS AND THE WORLD’ 267 


the body outside, as a guardian spirit follows a man. 
For there could never be a rational soul in an irrational 
being. | 

The transmigration of souls can be proved from the 
congenital afflictions of persons. For why are some 
born blind, others paralytic, others with some sickness 
in the soul itself? Again, it is the natural duty of Souls 
to do their work in the body ; are we to suppose that 
when once they leave the body they spend all eternity 
in idleness? 

Again, if the souls did not again enter into bodies, 
they must either be infinite in number or God must 
constantly be making new ones. But there is nothing 
infinite in the world ; for ina finite whole there cannot 
be an infinite part. Neither can others be made; for 
everything in which something new goes on being 
created, must be imperfect. And the World, being 
made by a perfect author, ought naturally to be perfect. 


XXI. That the Good are happy, both hving and dead. 


Souls that have lived in virtue are in general happy," 
and when separated from the irrational part of their 
nature, and made clean from all matter, have com- 
munion with the gods and join them in the governing 
of the whole world. Yet even if none of this happiness 
fell to their lot, virtue itself, and the joy and glory of 
virtue, and the life that 1s subject to no grief and no 
master are enough to make happy those who have set 
themselves to live according to virtue and have 


achieved it. 
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INDEX 


Achaioi, 66, 69. 

Acropolis, 94. 

Aeschylus, 274, 63. 

Affection, 131, 137. 

Agesilaus, 112. 

Agriculture, Religion in, 19 f. 

Alexander the Great, I19, 121, 
144, 193. 

Allegory, in Hellenistic philo- 
sophy, 199 ff.; in Olympian 
religion, 97. 

arAnrogayia, 125}. 

Alpha and Omens, God as, 181. 

Anaximander, 491. 

Angel = Megethos, 
Prd: 

Animal sacrifice, 226 f. 

Anthesteria, 31-3, 50. 

Anthister, 33°. 

Anthromorphism, 24 ff., 173. 

Antigonus Gonatus, 1861. 

Antiochus J, 178. 

Anti-semitism, 197. 

Antisthenes, 113, 116 f,, 123. 

Apathy, 1301, 138, 

Apellon = Apollon, 72. 

Aphiktor, 43. 

Aphrodite, 78. 

Apollo, 71, 94. 

Apotheosis of Hellenistic kings, 
1861, 

Apparitions, primitive belief in, 
42. 

Apuleius, 182. 

Aquinas, 17. 

Archontes, 198. 

Ares, 79. 

Arété, 116, 123, 126, 132 f, 

Aristarchus of Samos, 174. 


star, 


see 


Aristophanes, 361, 372, 841. 

Aristotle, 17, 142 f., 145 f., 149, 
160, 168, 187, 1881, 

Ark of Israel, go. 

Arnim, von, 1611, 206, 

Arnold, Professor E, V., 1271. 

Ascetism in antiquity, 235. 

Astrology, 176 f,, 253". 

Astronomy, 125. 

"Adava (AOnvn), 741. 

Atheism, 220 f., 229. 

Athena, 741, 94, 96; = Athenaia 
Kore, 73/5" Pallasy 72: 

Athens, effect of defeat of, 105 f. 

Atomic Theory of Democritus, 
129; of Ionia, 133. 

Attis/ 223. 

‘ Attributes ’, animals as, 35. 

Augustine, St., 213, 215. 

Aurelius, Marcus, religion of, 


2134. 


Bacchos, 195. 

Bacon, Professor, 207, 

‘ Barbaroi ’ as opposed to Hellenes, 
59; BapBapddwvor, 627. 

Bardesanes, 1987. 

Barnabas, St., 195. 

Beast-mask, 38-40. 

Bendis, 185. 

Bethe, E., 1841. 

Bevan, §., 9, §91)/1273,/197%,.207. 

Birth-rate, its effect on early 
Christian sects, 233. 

Blessedness, Epicurus on, 134. 

Body, Fifth, 170. 

Boars, 39. 

Bousset, W., 
207. 


9, 158, 184%, 196, 


270 


Buddhism, 24. 

Bull, blood of, 35; 
Hellenic ritual, 34-6. 

Bury, Professor J. B 


in. pre- 


Carpenter, Dr. E., 207. 

Caner, (Bist6o%, 

Centaurs, 82. 

Chadwick, H. M., 8, 66, 797, 80. 

Chaldeans, 177, 184. 

Chance, 163, 180. 

Charles, Dr., 207. 

xpav, 53. 

ypéeia, 116. 

Christianity, 114, 116, 123, 137, 
143, 148, 155-7, 211, 220f,, 
231-4. 

Christmas, Father, 30. 

Christos, 197. 

Chrysippus, 143, 1784, 179, 200. 

Chthonioi, as oracles, 53. 

Cicero, 42°. 

Circular movement, 2501. 

Circumeelliones, 52}. 

City of gods and men, world as, 
99; of Refuge, in the Laws, 
110; of Righteousness, in the 
Republic, 109: see Polis. 

Cleanthes, 168, 174, 200. 

Clemen, Carl, 207. 

Coinage, deface of, 117. 

‘ Collective Desire ’, God defined 
as the, 42, 44. 

Colotes, 1391. 

Comitatus, 66 f. 

Commagene, 178. 

Conceptions, Common, 241. 

Constantine, 233. 

Constantius, 218. 

Convention, 117. 

aaah BC 207; 

Cook, A. , 3it, 39, ie 70 f., 
781, 872. 

Copernicus, 125. 

Corinna, 63. 

Cornford, F. M., 491. 


INDEX 


Cornutus, 200. 

Cosmopolites, 119. 

Cosmos, 124-7, 249. 

Crates s(122+.200; 

Creedete Lr tw tin aae Me 

Crucifixion, 1981. i 

Cumont, F., 524, 158, 207. 

Cynics, 17, 116-18, 120-2, 131-2; 
women among, 1224, 

Cyropaedeta, 111. 

Cyrus, 112. 


Daemon = Stoicheion, 175. 

Dance, religious, 43 f. 

Davenport, F. M., 421. 

Davy iGyitoe 

Dead, worship of, 84.. 

Deification, E. Bevan on, 187°. 

Deliverer, the, 136. 

Delos, 72. 

Delusio, 203. 

Demeter, 94. 

Democritus, Aran Theory of, 
129. 

Demos, 108. 

Demosthenes, 108. 

Destiny, Hymn to, 168 : 

Dharma, 24. 

Diadocht, 189. 

Diasia, 28-30. 

dcarpify, 116. 

Dicaearchus, 149 ff. 

Didascaliae, 151. 

Diels, 491, 1611, 206. 

Dieterich, A., 327, 391, 45%, 158, 
179, 184%, 206. 

Dio Cassius, 176. 

Diocletian, 233 f. 

Diodorus, 177 f. 

Diogenes, 117-19, 121; his ‘tub’, 
119, 

Pee of Oenoanda, 1281, 142, 
204 f. 

Dione, 77. 

Dionysius, BU ryah, 94, LIT, 103; 


see Fate. 





INDEX 


dlomTpa, 152. 

Disciples, qualifications and con- 
duct of, 241. 

Discouragement due to collapse 
of the Polis, 107. 

Dittenberger, W., 301, 1901. 

Divine Mother, 198; ‘ Divine 
Wisdom ’, personified, 199. 

Dodds, E. R., 2191. 

DVoutté, E., 42 f. 

Dramaturge, 124. 

Drémenon, spring, 48 f. 

Diimmler, 113}. L 

Durkheim, Professor Emile, 201. 


Earth, divinity of, 170; Earth- 
mother, 45. 

nO0vn, 133. 

Education, 141°, 

Ekstasis, 183. 

Elements, Apuleius on, 182; 
divinity of, 170; in the Kos- 
mos, 175. 

émabvxodv, 2411. 

Enthoustasmos, 183. 

S575 « 

Epictetus, morals of, 215. 

Epicureans, 17, 139, 141, 147, 
TG20179.1,,.220, 

Epicurus, 128-39, 142, 161 f., 
168, 173 f.,.204,'2317. 

Epiphanés, 189. 

Epiphanius, 207. 

TPES, 53. 

Euergetés, 189. 

Euhemerus, 193 f. 

Euripides, 274, 754, passim, 176, 
185. 

Eusebius, 425, 236. 

Evans, Sir A., 35, 871. 

Evil, existence of, 257 ; origin of, 
225, 256-8. 

Expurgation of mythology, 98 f. ; 
Olympian, 83 f., 89 ff. 

Eye of Bel, 176. 


271 


Failure, Great, 108. 

Pamell> Drv loRiiss tiesto) 

Fate, 165, 167, 178, 180, 253 f. 

Federations, 106. 

Ferguson, W. S., 1861. 

First Cause, 224, 247 f. 

Fortune, 117, 164 f., 254 f. 

Fourth Century, Movements of, 
17, 105-52. 

Prazer, dir] Gesih33h 52411875, 


Gaertringen, Hiller, v., 332. 

Galaxy, 246. 

Games, Roman gladiatorial, 121. 

Garden, 135 f., 142. 

Gardner, Pie 7otn132+. 

Gennep, A. Van., 46°. 

YEpov, 47. 

Gerontes, 53. 

Ghosts, 266. 

Giants, 82. 

yiyverOar, forms of, 258 f. 

yAavkors, 39. 

Gnostics, 17, 155, 160, 170 f., 181, 
196. 

God, as the ‘collective desire ’, 
42, 443 conception of, in 
savage tribes, 24; does not 
rejoice, nor is angered, 260; 
essence of, 192; home of, 181 ; 
of the Jews, 197 ; rejections of, 
265f.; unchangeable, 226; 
Union with, 181. 

God-Man, as King, 186 ff. 

Gods, communion with, 226; 
Cosmic and Hypercosmic, 248 f.; 
men as, 169; nature of, 241 f. ; 
Twelve, 249; unchangeable, 
260; why worshipped, 261. 

Good, the, 114 f., 138, 224 f., 
248; happiness of, 267; Idea 
of, as Sun of the spiritual 
universe, 121, 

YPavs, 47. 

Gruppe, Dr., 33', 721, 737, 787, 
207. 


272 
Haga ‘Triada, sarcophagus of, 


35. 

Halliday, W. R., 481. 

Happiness, Natural, 131. 

Harnack, A., 232. 

Harrison, Miss J. E., 7, 28-46, 
passim, 181%, 

Hartland, E. S., 24. 

Haverfield, Professor F. J., 160. 

Heath, Sir T., 1741. 

Heaven, Third, 182. 

Hebrews, 157. 

Hecataeus, 177. 

Heimarmené, 167, 178, 253. 

Helen, Koré as, 171. 

Hellenes, conquered tribes took 
name of, 62; no tribe of, 
existing in ancient times, 61 ; 
same as Achaioi, 60. 

Hellenism, as standard of culture, 
61. 

Hellenistic Age, 17 f., 142, 145, 
158, 164, 177, 195, 201; 
culture, 157; philosophy, 199 ; 
revival, 60 ff. ; spirit, 186. 

Hera, 77. 

Heraclitus of Ephesus, 17, 201. 

Herakles, 78, 116. 

Hermes, 76, 185. 

Hermetica, 182, 185. 

Hermetic communities, 180. 

Hermias, 1441, 

Herodotus, 424, 59, 61, 621, 64; 
religion of, 213. 

Heroes, philosophers as, 187. 

Heroic Age, 68, 79. 

Heroism, religious, of antiquity, 
231, 

Hesiod, 64 f., 86 f. 

Hipparchia, 122}, 

Hippolytus, 207. 

Hoffmann, Dr. O., 632, 73°. 

Hogarth, D. G., 39. 

Holocaust, 29. 

Homer, 24, 64f, 69f, 754, 
passim, 87. 


INDEX 


Hosiétér, bull as, 36. 
Hubert and Mauss, MM., 2273. 


Idealists, 108. 

Idols, defence of, 1001, 
Illusion, 140, 147. 
Impalement, 1981. 
Infanticide, 215. 

Initiations, Hellenistic, 181-6. 
Instinct, 128. 

Interpreters, Planets as, 177. 
Tonia, 81 f. 

Jonian tradition, 129, 132. 
Tonians, 72. 

Iphigenia, 821. 

Lranes, 47. 

Irenaeus, 207. 

1ris;°77: 

Isis, 185, 200. 

Isocrates, 107. 


Jacoby, 194}, 

Jaldabaoth = Saturn, 180. 

Javan, sons of, 62. 

Jews, 157, 185, 226f.; God of, 
197. 

Judaism, 232. 

Julian, 9, (18 f., ‘217 £5) 22002 
222.1220; 

Justin, 861, 


Kaibel, 821, 

Kant, 168. 

Keraunos, 189. 

Kéres, 50. 

Kern, O., 36%. 

King, I., 454. | 

Kings, as gods, 230; divine, 
titles of, 189 ff.; predictions 
concerning, by Planets, 177; 
worship of, Igo. 

Koios, 200. 

Kore, 85 f. ; as fallen Virgin, 171 ; 
Earth, 45; Earth Maiden and 
Mother, 170. 

Kosmokratores, 179, 181, 198. 


INDEX 


Kosmos, 181, 2411; Moon as 
origin of, 203; planets as 
Elements in, 175. 

Kouré, Zeus, 184. 

Ses ie 184; Spring-song of, 
46. 

Kouroi, 45; dance of, 44. 

Kouros, 85 f., 94; Megistos, 44; 
Sun as, 46; Year-Daemon, 48. 

Kourotrophos, Earth, 45. 

Kpatos and Bia, 40, 191}, 

Kronos, 662. 

Kticavra, 38. 

KTiCW, 38. 

Kynosarges, 116. 


Lampsacus, 135. 

Lang, Andrew, 6, 314, 39}. 
Aafe Bidoas, 138. 
aueat,»W.., 00%, 691: 

Leagues, 106. 

Leontion, 136. 

Life, inward, 147 f. 

Adyos, 167. 

Lucian, Jcaro-Menippos, 29?. 
Lucretius, 55, 133, 1341, 142. 
Lysander, 189. 

Lysias, 107. 


McDougall, W., 1561. 

Macedon, 107, 159. 

Macedonians, 120, 144, 151. 

Mackail, Professor J. W., 63. 

Man, First, 198; Righteous, of 
Plato, 197; Second, 197f.; 
Son of Man, 197. 

Man-God, worship of, 189 ff. 


<— Mana, 34, 36, 39, 50, 1917. 


Marett, R. R., 1564. 
Margoliouth, Professor, 2011. 
Markos the Gnostic, 184. 
Marriage, Sacred, 32 f. 
Maximus of Tyre, 1001. 
Mayer, M., 662. 

Meade, G. R. 5S., 207. 


Mediator between God and 


273 


worshipper, 227; Mithras as, 
184; Saviour as, 196. 

Medicine-king, as Beds, 41, 185 f. ; 
powers of, 40, 

Megethos, 175. 

Meilichios, in the Diasia, 28-30, 
34. 

Meister, R., 741. 

Meyer, Ed., 1881. 

Mind, nature of, 251. 

Mithraic communities, 180. 

Mithraism, 181. 

Mithras, 155, 172, 186; as Medi- 
ator, 184; Liturgy, 179, 182 ; 
religion of, 36. 

Mommsen, August, 281, 32}, 33?. 

Monotheism, 91 f. 

Moon, as Kourotrophos, 45; as 
origin of Kosmos, 203 ; divinity 
of, 169 fi. 

Morals, minor, 215 ; of antiquity, 
215 f.; of Christians, 216. 

Moret, 391. 

Mother, Divine, 198 ; Great, 223. 

Miilder, D., 741, 782. : 

Mullach, 206. 

Miiller, H. D., 782. 

Music of the Spheres, 175. 

Myres, J.) Lt, 607. 

Mysteries, 120, 

Mystic letters, 261. 

Mysticism, 204. 

Mythology, Olympian, 97 f. 

Myths, Sallustius’ treatment of, 
222 fs why divine, 242 ft: 
five species, 243; explanation 
of examples, 244-7. 


Naassenes, 180, 196. 

Nature, the return to, as salvation 
for man, 118. 

Nausiphanes, 129. 

Neo-Platonism, 219. 

Nerve, failure of, chap. iv. 

Nikator, 189. 

Nilsson, M. P., 332, 36%, 46%, 481. 


274 


Nilus, St., 37. 
Norden, 193}. 


Octavius, 199, 221, 228}. 

Odin, 81. 

Ogdoas, 181. 

Oimégé, 106, 145. 

Olympian expurgation, 83f., 89 ff.; 
family, 25; reformation, 80, 
83 ff.; stage, 16; theology, 18. 

Olympian Gods, brought by 
Northern invaders, 66; char- 
acter of, 67-79; coming of, 
64.3 why so called, 65 f. 

Olympian religion, achievements 
Of, 95 fis), beauty of05 0 
conception of, 163; failure of, 
89-95. 

Olympians, origin of, 59 ff. 

Olympus, Mount, 66. 

Optimism, 231. 

Oracles, 53-5. 

Oreibasius, 43. 

Oreibates, 43. 

Organization, social, 256. 

Origins, Religious, 15. 

Orphic Hymns, 46; literature, 
86. 


Orphism, 181. 
Orthia, 47. 
Osiris, 200. 
Othin, 707. 
ovaia, 241%. 
Ovid, 737. 
Ozymandia, 178. 


Pagan prayer, a, 236 f.; reaction, 
AAG’, 

Paganism, final development of, 
231 f.; struggle with Christi- 

_anity, 234 f. 

Palimpsest, manuscript of man’s 
creed as, 238. 

Palladion, 73. 

Pallas, Athena as, 72, 94. 

Panaetius, 178. 


INDEX 


Paribeni, R., 352. 


| Parker, Mrs, Langloh, 26, 


Parmenides, 26, 271, 141%. 

TaTpia, TA, 53. 

Pauljist.,, 16 f, 22) 38, 40geaas 
156, 170, 182, 1911, 195, 198. 

Pauly-Wissowa, 281. 

Pausanias, 424, 75%, passim. 

Payne, I,J... 457, 467. 

Pelasgians, 62, 64. 

méepTTov copa, 170. 

Periclean Age, 113, 115. 

Peripatetic School, 142f., 145; 
spirit, 152. 

Peripatos, 142. 

Persecution of the Christians, 219. 

Persephone, 96 f. 

dappakos, 50. 

Pheidias, 70. 

diravOpwrria, 190, 192. 


| tAda, 131, 137. 


Philo, 207, 215. 

Phusis, 126, 167, 2411, 

Pindar, 47°, 63, 73”. 

Pisistratus, 63, 75. 

TLOTLS, 22s 

Planets, seven, history and wor- 
ship of, 172 ff. 

Plato, 17, 244,:274, 108-10,.5 4% 
159, 161, 197. 

Pleasure, pursuit of, 138. 

Plotinus, 16, 19, 251, 168; his 
union with God, 183. 

Plutarch, 424, 473.9502) i7e™ 
passim. 

Poimandres, 196. | 

TloAuas, 7, or ToAtevs, 6, 93. 

Poliouchot, 89. 

Polis, collapse of, 106 f., 159 f. ; 
projection of, 93; religion of, 
93, 98 f.; replaces Tribe, 88 f. 

Polybius, 106, 

Porch, 142. 

Porphyry, 1831, 2272. 

Poseidon, 75. 

Posidonius, 179, 193. 





INDEX 


Predestination, 179. 

Preuss, Dr., 16. 

Proclus, 2511. 

Proletariates, 233. 

Pronoia or Providence, 
belief in, 126, 167, 

Providence, 252 f, 

Wouxn, 2414, 

Ptah, 185. 

Ptolemaios Epiphanés, 190 f. 

Punishment, eternal, 23; why 
not immediate, 266. 

Purpose of Dramaturge, 124-7. 

Pythagoras, 201. 

Pythias, 144. 


Stoic 


Rack, martyrs happy on the, 230. 
Reason, as combatant of passion, 
pg Bee 
Peter of the Gnostics, 196 f.; 
Son of the Koré, 171. 
Redemption, mystery of, 197. 
Reformation, Olympian, 83 ff. 
Refuge, City of, in the Laws, 110. 
Refugees, sufferings of, 129. 
Reinach, A. J., 407. 
Reinach, S., 407, go!, 207. 
Reisch, E., 25°. 
Reitzenstein, 9, 158, 1843, 206. 
Religion, description of, 19-23; 
eternal punishment for error 
inj 23:0) falsenesss of, 20 ff: 
Greek, extensive study of, 6; 
traditional, 159; significance 
OfUEDC! 
Religious Origins, 15. 
Republic, 121. 
Retribution, 49. 
Reuterskiold, 364. 
Revelations, divine, 206; 
of, to worshippers, 185. 
Revival, Hellenistic, 60 ff. 
Ridgeway, Professor, 601, 757. 
Righteousness, City of, in the 
Republic, 109. 


series 


275 


Rivers, Dr., 47}. 

Robertson Smith, Dr., 36 f. 
Rome, a Polis, 160. 

Ruah, 170, 


Sacraments, I8I. 

Sacrifice, human, 51, 821; con- 
demned by Theophrastus, 227? ; 
Porphyry on, 227; reason for, 
261 f. 

Sallustius, 10, 199, 217-19, 222-4, 
259) 

Saturn, 180. 

Saviour, as Son of God and 
Mediator, 195 f.; dying, 51 f. ; 
Third One, 48. 

Sceptics, jeux desprit of, 114. 

Schultz, W., 207. 

Schurtz, Ed., 463, 

Schwartz, 193}. 

Scott, W., 207. 

Seeck, 0.5744, 1207. 

Sky, phenomena of, as origin of 
man’s idea, 168. 

Snake, supernatural, 34. 

Social structure of worshippers, 
184. 

Solon, 63. 

copa, 241}, 

Sophocles, 156. 

Sophrosyné, 95, 109, 142, 186, 236. 

Sors: see Fortune. 

Sétér, 189. 

Soul, divinity of, 187-99; hu- 
man, as origin of man’s idea, 
168 ; immortal, 224; nature 
of, 251 f.; salvation of, 198. 

Sparta, Athens defeated by, 106 ; 
constitution of, 113 ; power of, 
107. 

Spirit, Holy, 170; personified, 
199. 

Stars, divinity of, 169 ff., 187}. 

Steiner, von H. , Mutaziliten, 254 


Cioitigen 146, 179. 


276 


StOICS 1/17, ).909, st22—4, Waa te, 
137 f., 147, 160, 162, 178, 194, 
199. 

Suprdbera ray odwy, 178. 

Sun, 220 5: 44S. Kouras, 4G = 
both orb and ray, 2441; 
divinity of, 169 ff.; worship 
of, 172. 

Sunotkismos, 85. 

Superstition, 162. 

Sweetness, Epicurus on, 133. 

Swine, sacred, 34. 


Tabu, 50 ff. 

Tarn, W. W., 1061, 186}. 

Teletat, 48. 

Thales, 16. 

Oappetv, 122, 130 f. 

Themis, §2, 54. 

Theodoret, 219. 

Theoi Adelphoi, 188. 

Theophrastus, 176 f., 2277. 

Geos = Oeads, 40; use of the 
word by poets, 27. 

Thera 332. 

Gecpot, derivation of, 301. 

Thesmophoria, 30 f. 

Thespis, 63. 

Third One or Saviour, 48. 

Thomson, J. A. K., 667. 

Thoth, 185. 

Thought, subjective, 161. 

Thracians, 183 f. 

Thucydides, 61; religion of, 213. 

Thumb, A., 632, 661. 

Transmigration of souls, 266 f. 

Trigonometry, 152. 

Trinity, 198. 

Tritos Sétér, 197. 

Tvyn: see Fortune. 

‘Tyrants, ‘Thirty ’, 110. 


Uncharted region of experience, 
10 fh9/200,/227) 
Urdummhbeit, 16, 65, 95. 


INDEX 


Usener, 1281, 141°, 1611, 206. 
Uzzah, go. 


| Vandal, 602. 


Vegetarianism, 221. 
Vegetation-spirit, 48. 
Verrall, A. W., 301. 

Vice, definition of, 255 f. 
Virgin, fallen, Koré as, 171. 
Virtue, definition of, 255 f. 
Vision, 132. 


Warde Fowler, W., 321. 

Webster, H., 463. 

Week of seven days established, 
175 f. 

Wendland, P., 9, 158, 190, 206. 

Wide, S., 941. 

Wilamowitz-Moellendorff,U.von, 
632, 81. 

Wisdom, Divine, personified, 199; 
Wisdom-Teachers, 16. 

Woodward, A. M., 473. 

Word, the, personified, 199. 

World, ancient and modern, 149 ; 
blessedness of, 203; end of, 
by fire, Christian belief in, 
228 ; eternal and indestructible, 


224 f., 228, 249-51, 262-5. 


Xenophanes, 27. 
Xenophon, 105, 111, 113. 
om 7 

EVVETLS, 96. 


Year-Daemon, 48 f. 


Zeller, E., 161. 

Zeno, 123 £., 126,'137, 161 f, 

Zeus, Aphiktor, 43; in Magnesia 
bull-ritual, 36; Kourés, 184; 
Meilichios, 28-30; origin and 
character of, 70 f.; watchdog 
of, 120. 

Zodiac, 177. 


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